“Nice landing,” one of the sailors on the flight deck called to him.

He grinned sheepishly. He never knew what to do with praise. Peterson would have milked it for all it was worth. Greenwald just said, “I didn’t crash the crate, and I didn’t smash me. I’ll take it.”

Another Wildcat roared off to keep the combat air patrol at full strength. The plane dropped toward the Pacific as it sped off the flight deck, then steadied and began to climb. Peterson watched it with affection. The Wildcat was a pretty good machine. It measured up fine against land-based American fighters. That had to mean the Japs didn’t have anything that even came close.

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK was a bum. He knew it. He was proud of it, as a matter of fact. He was a big blond man in his late twenties, his hair bleached even paler by constant exposure to sun and sea, his hide tanned almost as brown as a Hawaiian’s.

He hadn’t intended to turn into a bum. He’d graduated from Stanford in 1935: an English major with a history minor. His folks thought he should have studied accounting instead. But he was a second son, a kid brother, and Roger showed plenty of aptitude and eagerness for the family construction business when-if-Dad ever decided to retire. So, while disappointed, Oscar’s folks weren’t furious. They let him do what he wanted.

It was hard to be furious at Oscar anyhow. He had not a mean bone in his body. An aw-shucks smile made girls’ hearts melt. He’d studied coeds at least as much as Chaucer and Herodotus, and he’d got good grades in them.

As a graduation present, his folks gave him a trip to Hawaii. They booked him into the Royal Hawaiian, right on Waikiki Beach. The grounds were splendidly landscaped, with coconut palms and banyan trees insulating the great pink pile from the encroachments of the outside world. The room ran twenty dollars a day-this when millions would have got down on their knees and thanked God to make twenty dollars a week. Oscar had never had to worry about money-and he didn’t worry about it now.