"I doubt that you'll have any luck," Freddy Farmer sighed. "Technically, the vice-admiral hasn't anything to say about where we go next. We are Air Forces, you know. Loaned to Naval Aviation for instruction duty. Orders for us to proceed to any fighting zone would have to come from the Air Forces Command, not the Navy."
"Right, but did you have to bring it up?" Dawson groaned. "However, this business isn't cleared up yet. I've got me a funny feeling, I have."
"Was there ever a time when you hadn't?" young Farmer shot right back at him. "What's it this time? That we're going to fail tomorrow?"
Dawson didn't reply for a moment. He walked along the moonlit and shadowed road, hands jammed in his pockets, and a faraway look in his eyes.
"Yeah, Freddy," he eventually said slowly, "I guess you could put it that way. I've been making the old brain wheels spin over in high gear on all this business. And I stumbled on one little item that maybe throws the whole thing out of whack. Time."
"Time?" Freddy Farmer questioned with a frown.
"Yeah, time," Dawson said. "No matter how you look at it, the carrier force was far at sea when you and I stopped hearing the birdies sing. And ..."
"But you said...!" young Farmer began.
"I know," Dawson stopped him. "I said that being as how things were all arranged, they probably took a chance and had that Nazi spy go back aboard his ship. But later, when the Jap guessed that we were going to do things about it, he stopped taking chances."
"You certainly don't make sense," Farmer growled. "But if you're referring to the Nazi spy, no matter what the Japrat decided, or didn't decide, the Nazi was far at sea by then. And on his way to Pearl Harbor."