My God, if there was going to be a war they’d need stocks of everything! He looked at his watch. He had yet to shave and dress, and he must allow an hour and a half for the drive to McCoy, ten miles south of Orlando, when you considered the main highways clogged with tourists, and Orlando’s infuriating and hopeless traffic tangle on a sunny payday less than three weeks before Christmas. And there might be some delay at the McCoy gate. He decided to give himself two hours on the road.

Still, he could start the list, and there was one thing he should do right away. Ben Franklin drank a quart of milk a day and Peyton, his eleven-year-old sister, even more. He telephoned Golden Dew Dairy and revised his delivery order drastically upward. This was Randy’s first act to meet the emergency, and it was to prove the least useful.

Chapter 2

Randy left the house in time to see Missouri wedge herself under the wheel of the Henrys’ Model-A Ford, an antique—so certified with a “Q” tag issued by the state-but kept in perfect running order by Malachai’s mechanical ingenuity. “I haven’t finished but I got to go now,” she said. “Mrs. McGovern, she holds the clock on me. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

The Model-A, listing to port with Missouri’s weight, bounced down the pebbled driveway. Randy got into his new Bonneville. It was a sweet car, a compromise between a sports job and a hardtop, long, low, very fast, .and a lot of fun, even though its high-compression engine drank premium fuel in quantity.

At eleven, approaching Orlando on Route 50, he turned on the radio for the news. Turkey had appealed to the UN for an investigation of border penetrations by Syria. Syria charged Israel with planning a preventive war. Israel accused Egypt of sending snooper planes over its defenses. Egypt claimed its ships, bound from the Black Sea to Alexandria, were being delayed in the Straits, and charged Turkey with a breach of the Montreaux Convention.



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