Big Snafu
“Come on
guys, let’s clean up, uh,”
He said as he started picking up chairs
from the floor. We all looked at one another, and smiled.
“Wonder wat’s eating Gerb,” sarge
murmured.
Of course we jumped in, and did our share,
but through it all, he was very quite, not a word from him. Lucky us. Most
of the time it was really slow at night; we cleaned up
quickly; killed the rest of the night playing all kinds of card games; and listened to
Gerber’s bull.
The teletypes would start going crazy
around eight in the morning, just before the day shift arrived.
Gerb must have been off world, his mind wasn’t focused at all. He was being
very methodical, and doing every thing annoyingly slow, as if his thoughts were
elsewhere. We managed to finish our clean up just a few moments before the
teletypes came alive, but all incoming messages were encrypted.
It was
the computers function to decipher them. The computers weren’t working. The shift
NCO in charge, sergeant Hacker, called in the maintence crew.
“Whats up sarge, any change, yet” Scotty
asked when he showed up.
“Na man, we changed the cards, re-calibrated
ciphers, nothing works, man.”
At oh eight hundred hours, the day shift
showed up, but we couldn’t leave because we had to hand over the comm room in the
same working order as we got it. Since it wasn’t, we couldn’t leave. So as they worked on the computers, we hung out, drinking coffee, smoking, and speculating on why the computers weren’t working.
“Well did you guys do this?”
“Yea, man!”
“Ditcha do det?”
“Yeah!”
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