“I bet,” I said sympathetically. “You’re, uh, pretty close to the Major?”
She said stiffly: “I’m not married to him, if that’s what you mean. Though I’ve had my chances…. But you see how it is. Fifteen thousand people to run a place the size of New York! It’s forty men to operate the power station, and twenty-five on the PX, and thirty on the hotel here. And then there are the local groceries, and the Army, and the Coast Guard, and the Air Force—though, really, that’s only two men—and—Well, you get the picture.”
“I certainly do. Look, what kind of a guy is the Major?”
She shrugged. “A guy.”
“I mean what does he like?”
“Women, mostly,” she said, her expression clouded. “Come on now. What about it?”
I stalled. “What do you want Arthur for?”
She gave me a disgusted look. “What do you think? To relieve the manpower shortage, naturally. There’s more work than there are men. Now if the Major could just get hold of a couple of prosthetics, like this thing here, why, he could put them in the big installations. This one used to be an engineer or something, Vern said.”
“Well … like an engineer.”