Hanging on

Kelly looked at his watch. How much time had he wasted with Hagendorf? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Too much.
        Suffering from a severe headache, traces of blood still crusted in his yellow hair, Lieutenant Beame went straight from the hospital bunker to the secluded knoll in the woods where he and Nathalie had secretly planned to have lunch together. He was very circumspect about leaving the camp, and he was sure no one saw him go. He crept cautiously through the woods, took a circuitous route to the knoll through blackberry brambles and treacherous ground vines.
        Natalie was waiting for him.
        But so was her father.
        "You are scum!" Maurice said, advancing on Beame as the lieutenant backed off the knoll and into the trees again. "My daughter will not be brought to ruin by a quick-handed soldier. Do you understand?"
        "Yes, sir," Beame said, backing into an oak tree. "But-"
        "She will be courted openly, not behind my back. And she will not be made a fool of by some carousing GI. Need I say more?" He loomed over Beame, his big belly perfect for intimidating anyone he could back against a wall.
        "Father-" Nathalie began, behind the old man.
        "Do not interrupt your father," Maurice said, without turning back to her. He pushed at Beame with his belly, crushing the lieutenant against the oak.
        "Sir," Beame said, "you don't seem to realize-"
        "I do not wish to become violent," Maurice said. "But I can if I must." As example, he clenched his fist and thumped Beame once, on top of the head, right on the spot where the bottle had broken. "Understand?"
        Through tears, Beame said, "Uh… yeah. Yes, sir."
        Maurice turned away from him. "Come on, my dear," he told the girl, in French. "And in the future you must respect your father more."
        Major Kelly ate lunch while riding around on the D-7 dozer with Danny Dew. He had to stand up, wedged between the open dash and the roll-bar behind Dew's chair- which was a tight fit and only crucial inches from the churning tread. That made for a messy lunch, but not merely because the dozer shimmied and bounced so much. It was messy chiefly because Kelly was eating a stewed-tomato sandwich.
        "Is that a stewed-tomato sandwich?" Danny asked when Kelly climbed on the dozer, holding the oversized sandwich in one hand. Red juice and slimy seeds dripped from Kelly's fingers, ran down his wrist and under his cuff.
        "Yeah," Kelly said. "Because of my hair." He bit the sandwich, and juice sprayed all over his face.
        "A stewed-tomato sandwich is good for your hair?" Dew asked.
        "No. It's not good for my hair. But it isn't bad, either. It's neutral. It's meat that's bad for hair growth, you see."
        "Meat?" Dew asked.
        "Meat. So I eat vegetable sandwiches." He took another bite. "Can we get going? I want to see the whole camp. I want to be certain that Hagendorf designed the streets the way I laid them out. I don't trust the crazy drunken bastard."
        Dew started the D-7, taking his eyes from Major Kelly's disgusting repast only with the greatest effort.
        They roared away from the riverbank and circled the camp on the service road that edged the forest. Clouds of dust sprayed up behind them; and because the dozer could not proceed with any real speed, the dust often caught up with them, swept past, bringing temporary blindness and laying a soft, golden-brown patina over them, a sheath which darkened Kelly and lightened Danny Dew.
        Already, Danny had finished most of the work on the streets. With the dozer's monstrous blade barely scraping the surface, he had smoothed the land which Kelly had charted and which Hagendorf had staked. He had plowed off four inches of topsoil, then rolled back and forth over the streets to compact and harden the well-aerated earth which lay beneath the sod. This made the fake village's streets lower than its houses, conveyed an impression of much use, years of wear.
        "Looks pretty good, doesn't it?" Danny Dew shouted above the engine noise.
        "Not good enough!" Kelly shouted.
        "Looks like we're going to build a village in four days, doesn't it?"
        "No," Kelly said. "Never."
        The major was not the least bit pleased by any of the pleasant things he saw. The streets had been marked off just as he had planned them. All that remained to be done to them was the removal of the