15,250/32,000. Better, but not quite at a good cruising speed. Finished “The Fight in the Grove,” (final wordcount: 5,300) and am now working on “Processing Duty.” I am starting to think that this may be a five-story job. Which would be a further complication. Ach, well.
From “Processing Duty:”
So I’m there doing the job, and my co-worker Jack comes into the processing room. He didn’t seem any worse than usual, at first. But that’s not the easiest thing to figure out, on the site. A lot of us, we got what you’d call quirks. Either from what got us our jobs, or what we’ve seen since getting ‘em. In Jack’s case, he was just generally twitchy and laughed at weird times. Not what you’d call noteworthy in this place, really. Hell, that’s barely worth mentioning.
What? No, I didn’t like him at all — and I’m not saying that because of what happened. I never liked him, and there’s two years’ worth of monthly shrink reports right on the desk there to prove it. I put up with him, because that’s what you do at the Site. We just don’t have enough people to do the jobs.
But, I’ll be honest here, gentlemen: I don’t think Jack was also a Commie, no matter what your Mr. Hoover might believe. From what I hear, the Reds hate all this weird stuff way more than we do. Doesn’t fit the way they think, so they just shoot or burn it all on sight without trying to figure out what’s weird and dangerous, and what’s just weird. Which helped us out of a jam in Korea, didn’t it?