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tried.

CHAPTER 3

    Midshipman Keith
    Willie Keith’s second day in the Navy came close to being his last in the service or on earth.
    Riding on the subway that morning to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in his blue apprentice seaman raincoat, he felt conspicuously military. The fact that he was going for a check on his pulse rate and lordosis did not spoil his enjoyment of the glances of stenographers and high-school girls. Willie was collecting the homage earned by men otherwise occupied in the Solomons. In peacetime it had not been his habit to envy sailors their costume, but now suddenly these bell-bottom trousers seemed as correct and dashing as beer jackets had been on the Princeton campus.
    Outside the gates of the Navy Yard Willie stopped, exposed his wrist to the raw cutting wind, and counted his pulse. It was tripping at eighty-six. He was enraged to think that his new naval aura might be stripped from him by a mere arithmetical failure of his body. He waited a few minutes, trying to relax, and took another count. Ninety-four. The marine sentinel at the gate was staring at him. Willie looked up and down the street and began walking toward a dingy drugstore at the corner, thinking, “I had a dozen physicals at college, and one at the receiving station several months ago. My pulse was always seventy-two. Now I’m worried. What the devil is an admiral’s pulse rate when he sees the enemy fleet-seventy-two? I’ve got to take something to cancel the worry. and give a normal result.”
    He swallowed this argument, and a double bromide; the one for his conscience, the other for his pulse. Both sedatives worked. When he hesitated for a moment outside Captain Grimm’s office for a last check, his blood thumped tranquilly past his fingers at seventy-five, and he felt buoyant and relaxed. He pushed open the door.
    The first object that caught his eye in the room was a blue sleeve with four gold stripes on it. The sleeve was gesticulating at a fat Navy nurse seated at a desk. Captain Grimm, gray and very tired-looking, was waving a sheaf of papers and complaining bitterly about slipshod accounting of morphine. He turned on Willie. “What is it, boy?”
    Willie handed him the envelope. Captain Grimm glanced at the papers. “Oh, Lord. Miss Norris, when am I due at the operating room?”
    “In twenty minutes, sir.”
    “All right, Keith, go into that dressing room. I’ll be with you in two minutes.”
    “Aye aye, sir.” Willie went through the white-painted door and closed it. The little room was stuffily hot, but he was afraid to tamper with the windows. He wandered around in a narrow circle, reading labels on bottles, looking out the window at the sad gray jumble of the Brooklyn waterfront, and yawning. He waited two minutes, five, ten. The bromide and the warmth took stronger hold. He stretched out on the examining table, assuring himself that a little relaxation would be good for him.
    When he woke his watch read half-past five. He had slept, forgotten by the Navy, for eight hours. He washed his face in a basin, straightened his hair, and emerged from the dressing room with a look of martyrdom. The fat nurse’s jaws fell open when she saw him.
    “Holy Christmas! Are you still here?”
    “Nobody ever told me to come out.”
    “But my God!” She jumped out of the swivel chair. “You’ve been here since- Why didn’t you say something? Wait!” She went into an inner office, and came out in a moment with the captain, who said, “Blazes, boy, I’m sorry. I’ve had operations, meetings- Step into my office.”
    In the book-lined room he told Willie to strip to the waist, and inspected his back. “Touch your toes.”
    Willie did it-not without a loud grunt. The captain smiled doubtfully, and felt his wrist. Willie sensed hammering again. “Doctor,” he exclaimed, “I’m okay.”
    “We have standards,” said the captain. He picked up his pen. It hovered over Willie’s record. “You know,” he added, “Navy