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Earl’s mother sat with all her might on the roundhouse. “Blamme!”

She stepped down from the table, and before Earl could order his senses, his mother was upstairs again.

When Earl finally came upstairs, shocked and weary, he found only his wife, Ella, who sat on the couch, her feet thrust straight out. She looked dazed.

“Where’s Mom?” said Earl. There was no anger in his voice—only awe.

“On her way to a movie,” said Ella, not looking at Earl but at a blank place on the wall.

“She had the cab waiting outside.”

“Blitzkrieg,” said Earl, shaking his head. “When she gets sore, she gets sore.”

“She isn’t sore anymore,” said Ella. “She was singing like a lark when she came upstairs.”

Earl mumbled something and shuffled his feet.

“Hmm?” said Ella.

He reddened, and squared his shoulders. “I said, I guess I had it coming to me.” He mumbled again.

“Hmm?”

He cleared his throat. “I said, I’m sorry about the way I double-crossed you tonight. Sometimes my mind doesn’t work too hot, I guess. We’ve still got time for a show. Would you go out with me?”

“Hey, Hotbox!” cried Harry Zellerbach, hurrying into the room. “It’s the nuts. It’s terrific!”

“What is?”

“It really looks like it’s been bombed. No kidding. You photograph it the way it is, and show people the picture, and they’d say, “Now there’s a battlefield.” I’ll go down to the shop and get some gun turrets from model airplane kits, and tonight we can convert a couple of your trains into armored trains, and camouflage ’em. And I’ve got a half-dozen HO Pershing tanks I could let you have.”

Earl’s eyes grew bright with excitement, like incandescent lamps burning out, and then dimmed again. “Let’s run up white flags, Harry, and call it a night. You know what Sherman said about war. I’d better see what I can do about making an honorable peace.”

GIRL POOL

My good, beloved wife, née Amy Lou Little, came to me from the girl pool. And there’s an enchanting thought for lonely men—a pool of girls, teeming, warm, and deep.

Amy Lou Little was a pretty, confident, twenty-year-old girl from Birmingham, Alabama. When my wife-to-be graduated from secretarial school in Birmingham, the school said she was fast and accurate, and a recruiter from the Montezuma Forge and Foundry Company, way up north, offered her a very good salary if she would come to Pittsburgh.

When my wife-to-be got to Pittsburgh, they put her in the Montezuma Forge and Foundry Company’s girl pool, with earphones and a Dictaphone and an electric typewriter. They put her at a desk next to Miss Nancy Hostetter, leader of section C of the girl pool, who had been in the girl pool for twenty-two years. Miss Hostetter was a great elk of a woman, righteous, healthy and strong, and inconceivably fast and accurate. She said Amy was to look upon her as a big sister.

I was in the Montezuma Forge and Foundry Company, too, a rootless pleaser of unseen customers. The customers wrote to the company, and twenty-five of us replied, genially, competently. I never saw the customers, and the customers never saw me, and no one suggested that we exchange snapshots.

All day long, I talked into a Dictaphone, and messengers carried off the records to the girl pool, which I’d never seen.

There were sixty girls in the girl pool, ten to a section. Bulletin boards in every office said the girls belonged to anyone with access to a Dictaphone, and almost any man would have found a girl to his taste among the sixty. There were maidens like my wife-to-be, worldly women made up like showgirls, moon-faced matrons, and erect and self-sufficient spinsters, like Miss Hostetter.

The walls of the girl pool were eye-rest green, and had paintings of restful farm scenes on them, and the air was a rhapsody of girls’ perfumes and the recorded music of André Kostelanetz and Mantovani. From morning until night, the voices of Montezuma’s men, transcribed on Dictaphone records, filled the girls’ ears.

But the men sent only their voices, never their faces, and they talked only of business. And all they ever called a girl was “operator.