"Maybe our boys are better than you think," said Hawsepipe. "We looked pretty good against Notre Dame."
"Notre Dame never makes a bum out of us. Don't forget Rip Miller has been assistant director of athletics at Navy for years. He was one of the seven mules on Notre Dame's Four Horsemen team, and those Irish stick together, you know. We've got a lot of good, hard-hitting kids, but there's no football brains in the club."
"Just like old Fighter Squadron Six on the Enterprise," said Hawsepipe. "If you guys had been on your own instead of having a cool head like mine to tell you what to do, the Japs would have plastered the Pacific with blood all over, but no brains."
"Leave us not get involved in any arguments about that," said Curly. "Anyway, now we've got the lowdown on the Army game... By the way, where are you working these days, Hawsepipe?"
"I'm up at the new Naval Ordnance Laboratory just outside of Washington. I'm working on stuff that's going to put you stick-and-throttle boys out of business - guided missiles."
"It will put your old racket in the ash can too, won't it?" said Curly. "Those missiles won't need any Combat Information Center quarterback to tell them where to go. I hear they will steer themselves automatically with target-seeking devices."
"Yeah," said Hawsepipe. "You ought to see some of the stuff we are working on now. We are building miniature radar sets that will fit into the nose of a small rocket. The whole set isn't any bigger than a pack of cards, but it's got a transmitter and receiver in it, complete with batteries."
"A little thing like that must be very fragile," said Curly.
"Fragile, hell! We put them in antiaircraft projectiles now, in place of the old-time fuses, and shoot them out of a five-inch gun. I don't call that fragile. They've got vacuum tubes the size of a peanut in them - no wires in them - at all. We just draw a wiring diagram, using metallic paint, and stick that in the missile."
As he made this last remark, Hawsepipe had picked up Jumpin' Joe's plastic gold flying helmet, which was lying on the sofa, and was turning it over in his hands. "Say," he said, looking inside it, "since when have they been putting earphones in football helmets?"
"That's not a football helmet," laughed Joe. "That's one of the new hard flying helmets the jet jockeys wear now."
"So-o-o-o," said Hawsepipe, "a flying helmet, the man says. Well, it certainly looks exactly like the gold helmets the Navy team wears, and it feels just about as rugged."
"They're made out of the same stuff," said Joe. "As a matter of fact, they both serve the same purpose - to protect the brains, if any, from bumps."
A faraway look had come into Hawsepipe's eyes. It was the kind of look that means "Caution, Man at Work." You could almost see the wheels going around inside his head.
After a minute Hawsepipe said, sort of casually, "He sits right there and tells me that this thing here isn't a football helmet."
"That's right," said Joe.
"But it looks like one, it serves the same purpose, it could be used for one. And tucked away inside it's got a radio receiving set."
"Yeah!" said Joe. "All the blowtorch pilots have been wearing -" His jaw dropped open. A great light began to dawn on him, and finally he said in an awed voice, "Well, I'll be darned."
"You ought to be," said Hawsepipe. "Here you've got the answer to a football coach's prayer clamped right on top of your head every time you go out to put your flight time in, and all it means to you is a flying helmet. I've always said I could see how you aviators earn your flight pay, but what do you do to earn your base pay?"
"But those are just earphones in that thing," protested Joe. "You've got to plug them into a receiver in the plane."
"I can make receivers at the Naval Ordnance Lab that will fit in the same space as those phones," said Hawsepipe, with the air of a carpenter saying he can saw a piece of wood in two.
"But after the first scrimmage they would be junk," said Joe.
"Oh, yeah? I suppose you think the Kaydets tackle harder than a five-inch gun kicks."
"Blow me down," said Jumpin' Joe. "If each one of the players had one of these helmets, I could sit on the bench with a walkie-talkie and -"
"Excellent, Dr. Watson, excellent," said Hawsepipe.
"Look!" said Joe, all excitement by now. "I can get you fifty of these helmets from the Naval Air Station at Patuxent tomorrow. How long will it take your gun club at the Ordnance Lab to fix them up for us?"
"Well," said Hawsepipe, "as the Air Force general said when the bomb missed the pickle barrel; 'The difficult we do immediately, the impossible may take some time.' I can have fifty for you in two weeks."
"How about job orders and bureau approval, and all that stuff?"
"Nothing to it," said Hawsepipe. "We've got an all-weather-flying project up there I can hang it on. We've got more dough for guided missiles than we can spend anyway, and rather than turn some of that money back to the Treasury to be wasted we can just shift it to this improved type of flying helmet."
Next day the Navy set up task forces to implement this program in a gung-ho fashion. At the Naval Ordnance Laboratory a "Frantic" priority was placed on a project to equip fifty jet flying helmets with miniature radios for "top secret" missions. This was to be a crash program having right of way over even Atomic Energy Commission and CIA projects.
In midmorning, an Athletic Association truck from Annapolis screeched to a halt, delivered the helmets, and Hawsepipe rushed them into a high security area in the electronics lab that had been hastily cleared for them.
In Annapolis that afternoon, the football squad met in the gym behind locked doors guarded by Marines for an hour's "skull practice." They came out of the session looking as smug, and wise as a tree full of well fed owls.
The atmosphere around Annapolis took on a sudden change. Before long everybody knew that something big was cooking and that it smelled pretty good. All sorts of rumors got loose, most of them planted by the coaches, but none of them near the truth. The Navy has had long experience in keeping snoopy outsiders - such as newspaper reporters, congressmen, and the Secretary of Defense - from finding out about things they shouldn't know. They guarded this secret more closely than the Manhattan Project. The Admiral was given a very vague and evasive briefing that something big was cooking, and had sense enough to just look wise and keep his nose out of it.
Of course during the month preceding the Army game, everybody around Annapolis always gets hopped up on wishful thinking and common sense gets the deep six. Every year the whole Navy is able to convince itself that this time they've got a chance to upset the applecart and beat Army. Often they don't really believe this, but they are able to work up a lather of hysteria that makes them think they believe it.
Old sea dogs whose shrewd and seasoned judgment was battle-tested in the Pacific many times let their emotions run away with them as the end of November approaches. They can calculate the precise odds in any naval engagement except this annual clambake with West Point. They go up to Philadelphia with a faraway look in their bleary eyes, full of gin and hope.
Of course, the coaches always put out the usual malarkey in October no matter how grim and hopeless Navy's chances are. But this time you could tell they meant it.
After word got around, large sums of money were bet. Even Holy Joe, senior chaplain at the Academy, laid $20 on the game; and he never bets on a sports event unless it is fixed, unless he is in on the fix, and unless the fixers are honorable and trustworthy characters who are personal friends of his.
When Curly got back to San Diego and advised Admiral Day to bet all the money he could on Navy the Admiral at first considered grounding him and asking the Bureau of Personnel for a new squadron commander. Curly couldn't let even the Admiral in on the big secret. But admirals can always be persuaded that Navy is going to win. The old duffer finally bet a hundred bucks on the game with an Army general, thus starting a rumor going in service circles which got all the way back to the Pentagon that one of the top admirals in the P
acific Fleet had gone nuts.
The game itself now had assumed a permanent place in naval history alongside the exploits of John Paul Jones. It was about the biggest upset in sports history since the David and Goliath fight. It started off just about the way the experts expected, with Navy fumbling the opening kickoff away to Army on its own 20-yard line. It looked as if the rout was going to begin before the crowd even got settled in its seats.
At this point even the Army rooters were pulling for underdog Navy - not rooting for them to win, of course, but just hoping they could put on a decent show and play some sort of game worth watching. They hoped Navy might fight them off for a quarter or so and be able to hold the final score down to maybe 21 to 0.
But Navy stopped the next four plays by Army's powerhouse as if they had called the plays themselves and knew exactly where they were going. Those cadets got smacked into the dirt as if they hadn't even read their own press clippings.
It was a rout, all right, but it didn't go according to the previously prepared script. Army was rammed back on its heels and held there the rest of the game. Nobody would believe it at first, and even when Navy went into the last quarter with a 14-to-2 lead, some of the radio announcers were still talking as if this couldn't last and the roof would fall in on Navy any minute.
But Navy outgeneraled the Army all the way. When Navy had the ball, Army never knew what was coming up next. The Navy quarterback mixed up his off-tackle slants, fakes, reverses, and passes like a magician.
Whenever there was a time out during the game, two sailors would rush out onto the field pushing a fancy-looking water cart and Navy players would gather around it with their heads down close to it. For a minute in the second period Jumpin' Joe thought Navy had been caught with its pants ajar. The referee got a hell of an electric shock trying to take a drink from the cart. But the fast-talking sailors explained to him that there was an electric ice machine inside the cart.
Those sailors weren't any ordinary swab jockeys. They were hotshot electronic technicians. And that "water cart" was full of troubleshooting machinery to fix busted helmets in a hurry.
Some of the sportswriters said it reminded them of the kind of quarterbacking Navy used to get back in the days when Jumpin' Joe Sifton was making All-American. When Army had the ball, it seemed as if Navy knew more about each play they pulled off than Army did themselves. Any number of times, Cadet ball carriers were brought down by gang tackles of four or five Middies on plays that had been fooling the opposition all year.
The Navy defense shifted on almost every play. On some plays, linesmen would pull out and head for the spot where the ball was going before it was snapped. When Army were trying to set up their passes, they would run a couple of plays into the line, with a decoy fading way out as if to get a pass. Navy's defenses would pay no attention to him. Then another play would start the same way, but wind up with a pass to the decoy, and the whole Navy backfield would be swarming around the receiver before the pass was halfway there.
When Navy was on the offensive they spent hardly any time in the huddle. They would just sort of bump their heads together in a bunch and then rush right back to the line of scrimmage. Their two touchdown plays came without any preliminary huddle at all, and without any signals being called. They just sort of exploded out of the debris of the previous play while Army was still picking themselves up and rubbing the dirt out of their eyes. It looked as if somebody was running the team by telepathy.
Out in San Diego that evening in the Officers' Club, Commander Cue was explaining to Admiral Day the secret of the great upset. At the end of his exposé, he said, "I can just see what all the headlines are going to say tomorrow: 'Fired-up Navy upsets favored Army.' But Navy wasn't fired up - it was just wired up."
"By the great horned spoon, I'm about ready to believe anything can happen these days," said the Admiral. "I wouldn't even be surprised if we have rockets in orbit around the world and men walking around out in space before long."
"Could be," agreed Curly. "Of course, Admiral," he continued, "this stuff I just told you is still Top Secret. If the Army ever finds out about it, they'll blow the roof off the Pentagon. There will probably be a Congressional investigation and the Joint Chiefs will hold a special session and annul that game by a 3-to-l vote."
"That's right," said the Admiral gravely. "They might even get so mad about it they would bring Louis Johnson back as Secretary of Defense; and God help the free world if that happens!"
Chapter Twelve
WILLY'S MISSION TO MOSCOW
Soon after the saucer episode, Ensign William Wigglesworth was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade, and Admiral Day drafted him for duty as his flag lieutenant. News of this appointment swept through naval circles in San Diego like a hurricane warning and left the community in a state of shock. Heads were shaken sadly, and opinions were given that the Admiral was growing barnacles on the brain.
A flag lieutenant is supposed to be a social secretary. He is the Admiral's personal aide, keeps track of all his official and unofficial commitments, screens incoming phone calls, opens the mail, and greets visitors. Aboard ship he must have at his fingertips the protocol section of the Navy Regulations Book. He must know how many side-boys to produce for visiting VIPs, ranging from junketing congressman to cannibal chiefs from the UN. He must know whether a maharajah gets thirteen or fifteen guns and how many ruffles and flourishes the bandmaster must give an air vice marshal.
Ashore he must be familiar with all the fine print of Emily Post's latest volume on etiquette. He must also know what uniform and medals the Admiral has to wear to a state dinner for the Poobah of Pakistan and must not pinch the hostess in the fanny at formal receptions or spit tobacco juice on the ballroom floor. He should always be immaculately dressed and must be a smooth operator who can say no in a way that takes ten minutes and leaves his victim with the impression that he has done him a big favor. He tags along wherever the Admiral goes, nudges the Admiral's elbow and raises an eyebrow whenever the old gentleman leaves his zipper open, and never takes any action whatever on his own initiative, except to whip out a cigarette lighter when the Admiral decides to have a smoke.*
* In justice to a number of fine young officers who had the misfortune of serving as my flag lieutenant and who did a fine job under difficult circumstances, I must point out that this book is pure fiction. It is also pertinent to observe that old sailors are notorious liars and that retired ones are the worst of all. - D.V.G.
There were many people in naval circles around San Diego who feared that Willy was not the right type for the job. They thought his philosophy of life was too carefree and frivolous, and that he lacked proper respect for long-established, traditional ways of doing things. They predicted that he would upsert tea carts and bust balloons all over the place and turn top-level naval functions into Roman holidays.
But they were wrong. Willy took to the new job as if he had taught Perle Mesta all she knew. He abandoned his evil companions in the air group and was not seen any more hanging around the bar in the BOQ. Some of his old friends said that his promotion had gone to his head. But although junior grade lieutenant is a great leap forward from ensign, it is only a half-stripe, and that certainly isn't enough to change a man's whole way of life. At least, not of a man like Willy.
As is so often the case when dissolute young officers give up their wanton ways and become respectable citizens, a good woman was the cause of it. Willy had fallen in love.
It was not with any of the many Navy brats around Coronado whose mothers are alert to get rid of them with a military wedding in the Air Station Chapel. Nor was it one of the many local civilian gals who lurk behind the potted palms in the officers' club ready to pounce on young bachelors wearing wings and drawing flight pay. Willy evaded all these snares but fell for the Queen of the Ball, the top banana of the local 400, U.S. Senator Worthington's baby daughter, Mary.
Mary's coming-out party at the Hotel del Coronado had be
en the highlight of the social season, but it was really just a sort of dry run for the one her mother figured on having in Washington when Congress met again.
The Senator and his wife were old friends of Admiral Day's and often had him in for dinner, which is how Willy got within hailing distance of Mary to begin with. At first her mother had taken a dim view of Mary's running around with a JG aviator. There were several young bachelor senators in Washington that Mama had her sights on. But Admiral Day assured the old gal that this boy had good stuff in him and was headed for the top. And Mary didn't always do what her mother said anyway.
Courting and winning Mary from the horde of drooling suitors who darkened her door in Coronado had been the damnedest rat race Willy had got into since Grandma left the gate open and the pigs got out. Eligible young bachelors swarmed around her place like students in a campus riot, and Mary's mother examined their credentials the way CIA screens Q clearances. Nobody took Mary out on a date until Mama had verified the marriage license of his grandparents and got a Dun and Bradstreet on his Old Man. But Willy and Mary soon found that they were kindred spirits, love broke out between them, and they hauled off and announced their engagement.
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