The following morning at zero-nine hundred hours, four craftsmen arrived from the air base. Heather was ready with plans and checklists spread out on a table near the stairway, but knew she had to wait.
“Good morning, specialists,” Major Ma-soran said, rising from her desk and striding into the main room.
They
saluted.
“At ease. You fellows are cleared to work around classified programs, are you not?”
“Yes,
Ma’am!”
“And you have greater rank and make more money because of that, do you not?”
“Yes,
Ma’am!”
“So the fact that I have brown eyes is . . .”
“Top secret, Ma’am!”
She noticed the general observing from his doorway. “And the fact that General Bo-seklin has gray hair is . . .”
“Top secret, Ma’am!” they said through smiles.
“And the fact that the person in charge of this remodeling project is seven years old, is . . .”
“Top secret, Ma’am!” they said with wide eyes, glancing at the little girl in old jeans and a T-shirt.
“Good. She knows this place, she knows the plans, and she’s fun to work with, but neither she, nor I, will put up with any disrespect.”
The major strode away as quickly as she had come, disappearing into the
NEBADOR Book Nine: A Cry for Help 56
general’s office and closing the door.
With four young men looking at her, Heather giggled and blushed. “Um
. . . gosh . . . let me see . . .” She found the sheet of paper she wanted, and tried to recover. “This is a classified program that meets in the morning, so after today, you can’t arrive before noon. You can eat lunch here if you want, even dinner. I want you to be happy, well-fed, and proud of your work.”
They nodded with appreciation.
“I’ll be working right with you, but I can’t do heavy stuff . . .”
Two of them dramatically flexed their arm muscles.
Heather smiled and grabbed another sheet. “Phase One is getting rid of some old stuff. See that suspended ceiling? It goes.”
They wandered around the room and looked it over. “No problem,” one said. “In the side rooms, too?”
“No, they have hard ceilings. But I want you to remember, every minute you’re working, that the log trusses and boards up there are going to remain visible when you’re done, so you have to carefully remove every screw so you do as little damage as possible. Can do?”
“It’ll be slower that way.”
“Not a problem.”
“Okay, sure. The base loves it when we salvage stuff.”
“Let’s start over here with the outer office, so we have to move the major’s and colonel’s desks into the big room . . .”
They cleared the office of furniture while Heather got the little stuff, then brought in ladders. The electrician was up in the ceiling first, disconnecting the old light fixtures. Heather received ceiling panels as they were handed down, stacking them near the stairs.
By noon, with the desks replaced, Major Ma-soran could look up and see varnished logs and stained boards instead of dingy white panels. She smiled at the general, who watched the process from his office door.
The four men and Heather were working their way across the big room in the middle of the afternoon when the test proctor arrived from the air base, a squirrelly little man with glasses.
NEBADOR Book Nine: A Cry for Help 57
“I am supposed to administer . . . let me see . . . this is quite unusual . . . a Doctoral Entrance Exam.”
Major Ma-soran welcomed him. “Sorry about the construction work.
There’s a conference room over here you can use.”
They walked that way.
As soon as he sat down, he wasted no time. “Name and rank of the applicant?”
“No name, no rank, this is an unofficial, unrecorded test.”
“I
cannot proctor a test without filling in all the blanks on the form!” he asserted.
The major sighed. “Jane Doe, cadet.”
“The Doctoral Entrance Exam can only be taken by commissioned officers who have documentation of a master’s degree.”
She let a long moment pass and took a deep breath. “You haven’t worked around classified programs before, have you, Lieutenant?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry, you won’t be working around them in the future, either.”
He was clearly flustered as she led him back out to the stairway.
“Sergeant, exit procedure for the lieutenant.”
Heather, carrying an armload of old ceiling panels, exchanged smiles with Sarah.
The lieutenant wore a frown of worry as he descended the stairs.
When he was gone, the general stepped out of his office. “I think I might have a solution.”
By the end of the week, the suspended ceiling was gone. At dinner on Friday, Heather sat with the craftsmen to talk about Phase Two, walls and light fixtures. They took the color swatches and model numbers, planning to get all the materials on Monday before arriving.
That evening, to celebrate, Heather dragged the tumbling mat into the big room under the newly-liberated log trusses. She danced for the security people until she was exhausted, curled up on a couch at about nine o’clock, and was instantly asleep.