“You haven’t heard the half of it,” said the co-pilot. “The Air Transport has lost nearly as many planes and more men on this particular airlift than it did in Korea while that was the big job. I don’t know how many other men have been killed. But there’s a strictly local hot war going on out where we’re headed. No holds barred! Hadn’t you heard?”
It sounded exaggerated. Joe said politely: “I heard there was cloak-and-dagger stuff going on.”
The pilot drained his cup and handed it to the co-pilot. He said: “He thinks you’re kidding him.” He turned back to the contemplation of the instruments before him and the view out the transparent plastic of the cabin windows.
“He does?” The co-pilot said to Joe, “You’ve got security checks around your plant. They weren’t put there for fun. It’s a hundred times worse where the whole Platform’s being built.”
“Security?” said Joe. He shrugged. “We know everybody who works at the plant. We’ve known them all their lives. They’d get mad if we started to get stuffy. We don’t bother.”
“That I’d like to see,” said the co-pilot skeptically. “No barbed wire around the plant? No identity badges you wear when you go in? No security officer screaming blue murder every five minutes? What do you think all that’s for? You built these pilot gyros! You had to have that security stuff!”
“But we didn’t,” insisted Joe. “Not any of it. The plant’s been in the same village for eighty years. It started building wagons and plows, and now it turns out machine tools and precision machinery. It’s the only factory around, and everybody who works there went to school with everybody else, and so did our fathers, and we know one another!”
The co-pilot was unconvinced. “No kidding?”
“No kidding,” Joe assured him. “In World War Two the only spy scare in the village was an FBI man who came around looking for spies. The village cop locked him up and wouldn’t believe in his credentials. They had to send somebody from Washington to get him out of jail.”