[pshrynk]

Slapping her feet down in an agitated tatoo, Vera reflected back on her realationship with Harv. He wasn't really all that bad, at least not for a man who had been morphed into a squid at least once. And there had been that time he'd flown his grumman Goose al the way up to Lake Managua, just to get her a bouquet of rare and endangered (probably extinct, now) orchids.

He just did not understand the needs of a woman, though. All that romantic stuff went only so far. Every now and then, she needed a man to go aout and kill a polar bear or something.

"Next thing you know, he'll be saying how rare polar bears are this close to the equator," she sniffed. Just like a man.

She turned her head toward the Canal Zone, hearing the faint tinklings of a really bad knock off Dorsey Orchestra. Probably playing at the Officers' Club, she thought. the Enlisted Club had to make do with phonographs of the real thing.