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By Root 1353 0

to prepare any meal fancier than fried Spam with canned pineapple atop. He was a twin, a truly startling thought; his sister was a missionary in the Yukon Territory. If she's anything like him, the natives will convert just to see what's on her mind. The Prokosch family came from Devon, one of the depot towns sprinkled out of an atlas in the last century when the Great Northern Railway needed names for its stops in the middle of nowhere across the top of Montana. The wrong side of the tracks of Devon at that, Ben divined: the father had always worked as a common section hand, riding a speeder on the rails across the prairie to wrestle creosoted ties into place and disgorge brush and muck from clogged roadbed culverts. A modern coolie. Sig with his accounting degree aspired to one of those American human cannonball advancements in a single generation, a desk job at the railroad home office in St. Paul. Ambition, incentive, a path in the mind with sufficient byways: little by little, the personality practically buried under that gray Coastie uniform began to assume shape as Ben made notes. Yet something kept nagging about Sig's enlistment in the Coast Guard and Ben could not get at it. Phrase it every which way, no clear answer could be drawn as to why someone from one of the most landlocked towns imaginable had chosen to turn into a beachpounder.

Until it emerged that Prokosch had a girl waiting for him back home in Devon. Inasmuch as Sig would have been a serious contender in an ugly contest, this constituted news. It also prompted in Ben a sense of relief that he was not sure he could defend, that the not particularly imaginative man at his side had chosen, with marriage aforethought, to put in his military time away from the front lines. Back at East Base in the farewell round of beers at the Officers' Club, Jake Eisman had leaned back and shrewdly observed, "Benjamin, you're maybe just as glad some of us are stationed stateside." How deny it? Given the toll on overseas members of the Supreme Team, if any of the others could be hoarded to safer duty, so much the better. Obituaries were the dregs of writing; if he never had to write another one it would be soon enough. Now Ben took a fresh look at Seaman Prokosch and asked, "What's this wonder woman's name?"

This brought a bashful dip of the head and the smitten intonement:

"Ruby."

When Sig spoke it, the word glowed as if it were her namesake gem. Love and the salt taste of absence, old as Odysseus, thought Ben as they tromped onward up the beach with the punctual waves always at their side. Wide open at the heart now, Sig poured forth the life he and Ruby were trying to plan in the time to come, that touchstone of all soldiers, after the war. Look that in the face long enough, and you begin to question the current sorry state of things. Sig at length reached the point where he brought out:

"Been going to ask you something. You get around in the war. You know about those balloon bombs?"

Ben merely nodded, to see where this would go. As if in some final desperate frenzy, Japan on its side of the Pacific had begun launching slim long-range balloons with explosive devices attached. The aim was to set the forests of the western United States on fire. Some of the balloons, weirdly like miniature paratroopers, had drifted as far as the Rockies. No great damage had been reported as yet, but the devices were worrisome if, as intelligence estimates had it, they were launched hundreds at a time.

Sig indicated the oceanic sky. "We spot any coming, we're supposed to shoot them down, ha." His gaze dropped to the watery horizon and stayed. "Maybe Animal will get first crack at them—Marines are supposed to take the lead, aren't they." A considering tilt of the head. "Kind of funny to think of him at the other end of this water, somewhere." Ben noticed he did not include Danzer, on destroyer duty in what was equally the Pacific, in this musing.

Reflection evidently over, Sig fixed his attention back toward Ben. He for once looked bothered. "They tell us the Japs even have their