Fun With Problems by Robert Stone Page A

that's not your job." The damn automated foghorn kept sounding its cadences as it had in and out of his anxious dreams.
    "Transport confirmed at the seat of government, Mr. Secretary."
    A gruff military type, the Secretary thought. More gruff than ought to be allowed. The Secretary wanted some explication of the agent's jargon but thought better of it. He knew enough to recognize it as an unfavorable portent. Everyone seemed ill-tempered, even people who had no right to be.
    On Heron's Neck, the Secretary had spent an uneasy night, though not for want of medication. He had lain awake a long time, and just when he began to drop off, a steward rapped quietly but insistently at his door. The
steward knocked quietly out of discretion, but also because, awakened suddenly, the Secretary sometimes shouted. Even
screamed,
the stewards told each other, and the word passed into use from the Secretary's households into government and political circles. A woman he happened to know who had called him owlish had also referred to him as Screamin' Newton. Someone had managed to let him know this, a false friend, a subordinate who had not been well-intentioned toward either of them. The word was that the pressures were getting to him.

    While the Secretary waited in his vehicle on the dock, his security detail's chief and Captain Negus of the MV
Squanto
were having a bad-tempered, pointless exchange over the gangway's having been down all night. The chief of security had angered Negus by insisting the captain had been ordered to secure it.
    "Wasn't by you," Captain Negus said.
    "No, it wasn't by me, Ace. Personally, not by me. But you were ordered to keep the vessel secure with the gangway up. That didn't get done, did it? So guess what?"
    Captain Negus did not like to be dressed down by people in sunglasses, which, off season, he took as a sign of moral inauthenticity. He was a buoyant soul, pretty easygoing but not used to scoldings. When the local Coasties checked his underway on-board passenger numbers or the supply of children's life jackets, the atmosphere was not chummy, but it was respectful, and there were handshakes without snipe or snip or snot like with the goddamned Heron's Necks. Captain Negus did not like being asked to "guess what?" because it brought to mind his unhappy childhood. Least of all did he like being addressed by a younger man as Ace. Captain Negus was proud of his past military time, although he shared several attitudes with Taylor Shumway, who was after all his second cousin.

    "You'll have to tell me, mister. I ain't much of a guesser."
    What the gruff agent delighted in telling him was that the boat would have to be gone over completely again, big spaces and small spaces, because the enemy's devices came in all shapes and sizes. His crew would have to have their papers checked again. It would take a lot of goddamn time and the Secretary would have to wait and the scheduled customers would have to take the ferry after his. When they walked out from under the car deck, the rain was falling harder and the security detail had put on their lettered rainwear and were reading the crewmen's laminated IDs again. A Coast Guard engineman, a boatswain's mate and one of the detail went through the vessel's spaces for the second time.
    After the security detail finished with the captain and crew and allowed them behind the auto barrier, the Secretary got out of his car and began measuredly pacing the plank section of the pier. He was so angry that he found it necessary to imagine subordinates, inadequate ones, close by. It was better than feeling alone. Sometimes, alone in silence, he would imagine dialectical conflicts with enemies, turning their taunts against them, making them out to be utter fools. Of course they were imaginary. Two agents monitored the ovoid orbit of his pacing.
    The rain eased again. Soon segments of blue appeared overhead. "What do they pay these weather dudes?" someone in the waiting group asked.