The General strode back and forth the length of the room. By God, by God, but civilians were a poor lot of mammals, by God! Didn’t they ever learn that you had to work together, even sacrifice yourself, for the whole? That very moment the General limped as he walked, and he had that limp from the day he took his regiment against a too strong German position. Everybody knew it was a hopeless attack. But it pegged some German reserves, and kept them off the neck of another American outfit somewhere. The men who died—and there were a lot of them—at least knew that they helped the whole army. In war you fought a common enemy. But these buyers and sellers—faugh!—they strangled each other. They squabbled even when the storm allied itself with the river, when hour by hour the readings of the gauges were higher and the rising water lapped searchingly along the levees. Suddenly the General felt a great disgust with man as a species. It might be a good thing if the situation pictured in his favorite passage should happen again and on a larger scale—if the whole valley (or the whole world perhaps) should become only a far-stretching welter of brown waters with a few heads bobbing about here and there for a little while.

Still, he would like to have an ark to save some of the better ones—a few good soldiers, and some of the men who were out there patrolling the levees right now in the rain, fighting the river and the storm, not figuring how to get a dollar and thirty-six cents out of some other fellow.

8

At the airport it was an easy day. In spite of the intense downpour, the planes came and went nearly on schedule. The tropical air was stable, and almost as trustworthy as high-pressure. The ceilings were ample; the wind was steady and moderate; there were no electrical disturbances. Even over the mountains there was no icing. The clouds lay in great, long strata, and between cloud-levels the pilots found good enough visibility. As for the heavy rain, that in itself was no hazard; it flew from the propeller-blades and from the fuselage and wings—and no harm done.

It was the best day that the Chief Service Officer had experienced since the beginning of the storm. But toward evening he grew a little nervous. It was like a dead calm; sooner or later it must break, and you began to wonder how it would break. He looked at the afternoon weather maps, and talked with the meteorologist.

“What’s that isolated line of cloud doing out there off shore?” he asked.

“Can’t make out exactly,” said the meteorologist. “Some kind of upper-air front. It’s been moving in closer for the last couple of days. We’re watching it.”