By the time anyone got around to paying attention to Artie, he wasn't there.
He closed the door quietly behind him and walked out the main door, nodding pleasantly to the guardsman, across the street to the car pool. It was all going so well, he thought dreamily, so very well. He even managed a little wry chuckle of amusement about the silly spectacle his wife had made of herself. That silly old business of the television station! That ridiculous story about the drive-in theater! But he could afford good-humoredly to overlook her raking up those long dead scores, because everything was going very well indeed.
Curfew? Not a problem, he thought with satisfaction, not as long as he had been wise and clever enough to pick up Mrs. Goudeket's trip ticket. The car was his now—he'd just have to say Mrs. Goudeket had sent him. He wouldn't be on foot for any length of time, and no one would bother him in the car, with a regulation trip ticket. The whole world was well within his grasp, he realized with satisfaction and joy.
And it was due at least in part to Sharon Froman. He nodded to himself in the darkness, picking his way carefully down the slippery street. She had written the official announcement of the plan for a Tri-State Emergency Allocations Supervisory Board that he and the congressman—with Sharon Froman—had cooked up.
Artie Chesbro chuckled out loud. Why, it was even Sharon who had been so resourceful about the matter of the benzedrine. He had been pretty near passed out with fatigue early in the day, even before the congressman had arrived; and she had produced, out of what she gaily called her "kit of writing tools," the little bottle of ten-grain tablets that had waked him up, sharpened his brain, made it possible for him to work on through the endlessly exhausting day.
A fine girl. A great acquisition. They would go far together, thought Artie Chesbro, stumbling dreamily down the misty street, filled with the sense of power, alive with the joy of achievement—coked to the eyebrows.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mr. Cioni saw the man approach jauntily. Who, he wondered, can be full of bounce at this hour—one of the new people from the field hospital? But as the man came into the cone of light from the shaded Coleman lantern he saw that the fellow wasn't army, that he wore in fact the uniform of an old-timer who had been through the day and a half on the spot. The uniform was a stained and shapeless suit, mud-caked shoes, red eyes and a growth of beard.