------------------------------------------------+

The Area Officer's acknowledgment was curt; embittered. For he was an
energetic young man, and he loathed his job. He wanted to be in the
west, where fighting of a highly unconventional nature was taking place
daily. He did not enjoy this business of watching an unthreatened
coast-line simply for the maintenance of civilian confidence and morale.
He preferred fighting.

Sergeant Walpole, though, exhaled a lungful of smoke at the telephone
transmitter and waited. Presently the rural Central said:

"All through?"

"Sure, sweetie," said Sergeant Walpole. "How about the talkies tonight?"

That was at 2:20 P. M. There was coy conversation, while the civilian
telephone-service suffered. Then Sergeant Walpole went back to his post
of duty with a date for the evening. He never kept that date, as it
turned out. The rural Central was dead an hour after the first and only
Wabbly landed, and as everybody knows, that happened at 2:45.

* * * * *

But Sergeant Walpole had no premonitions as he went back to his hammock
on the porch. This was Post Number Fourteen, Sixth Area, Eastern Coast
Observation Force. There was a war on, to be sure. There had been a war
on since the fall of 1941, but it was two thousand miles away. Even
lone-wolf bombing planes, flying forty thousand feet up, never came this
far to drop their eggs upon inviting targets or upon those utterly
blank, innocent-seeming places where munitions of war were now
manufactured underground.

Here was peace and quiet and good rations and a paradise for
gold-brickers. Here was a summer bungalow taken over for military
purposes, quartering six men who watched a certain section of coast-line
for a quite impossible enemy. Three miles to the south there was another
post. Three miles to the north another one still. They stretched all
along the Atlantic Coast, those observation-posts, and the men in them
watched the sea, languidly observed the television broadcasts, and slept
in the sun. That was all they were supposed to do. In doing it they
helped to maintain civilian morale. And therefore the Eastern Coast
Observation Force was enviously said to be "just attached to the Army
for rations," by the other services, and its members rated with M. P.'s
and other low forms of animal life.

Sergeant Walpole reclined in his hammock, inhaling comfortably. The
ocean glittered blue before him in the su