marvel of imagination, after all, for to Gary, these were no longer pilot-filled aircraft. They were robot drones - extraterrestrial robot drones. Or even better, they were extraterrestrial aircraft - so what if they still resembled the Russian MiGs - piloted by monster aliens, purely evil and come to conquer the world.
Crash and burn.
"Hey, stupid!"
Gary barely heard the call above the clanging din. He pulled off the headphones and spun about, as embarrassed as a teenager caught playing an air guitar.
Leo's smirk and the direction of his gaze told Gary all that he needed to know. He bent down from the stool and looked beneath the grinder, to the overfilled catch barrel and the pile of plastic flakes on the floor.
"Coffee man's here," Leo said, and he turned away, chuckling and shaking his head.
Did Leo know the game? Gary wondered. Did Leo play? And what might his imagination conjure? Probably baseball, like Gary's father.
They didn't call it the all-American game for nothing.
Gary waited until the last banging chunks had cleared the whirring blades, then switched off the motor. The coffee man was here; the twenty-minute reprieve had begun. He looked back once to the grinder as he started away, to the piled plastic on the dirty floor. He'd have to pick that up after his break.
Victory had not been clean this day.
The conversations among the twenty or so workers gathered out by the coffee truck covered everything from politics to the upcoming softball tournament. Gary walked past the groups, hardly hearing their talk. It was too fine a spring day, he decided, to get caught up in some discussion that almost always ended on a bitter note. Still, louder calls and the more excited conclusions found their way through his indifference.
"Hey, Danny, you think two steak-and-cheese grinders are enough?" came one sarcastic shout - probably from Leo. "Lunch is almost an hour and a half away. You think that'll hold you?"
"...kick their butts," said another man, an older worker that Gary knew only as Tomo. Gary knew right away that Tomo and his bitter group were talking about the latest war, or the next war, or the chosen minority group of the day.
Gary shook his head. "Too nice a day for wars," he muttered under his breath. He spent his buck fifty and walked back towards the shop, carrying a pint of milk and a two-pack of Ring Dings. Gary did some quick calculations. He could grind six barrels an hour. Considering his wages, this snack was worth about two barrels, two hundred enemy jets.
He had to stop eating so much.
"You playing this weekend?" Leo asked him when he got to the loading dock, which the crew used as a sun deck.
"Probably," Gary spun about, hopping up to take a seat on the edge of the deck. Before he landed, an empty milk carton bopped off the back of his head.
"What'd'ye mean, probably?" Leo demanded.
Gary picked up the carton and returned fire. Caught in a crosswind, it missed Leo, bounced off Danny's head (who was too engrossed with his food to even notice), and ricocheted into a trash bin.
The highlight of the day.
"I meant to do that," Gary insisted.
"If you can plan a throw like that, you'd better play this weekend," remarked another of the group.
"You'd better play," Leo agreed, though from him it sounded more as a warning. "If you don't, I'll have him" - he motioned to his brother, Danny - "next to me in the outfield." He launched a second carton, this one at Danny. Danny dodged as it flew past, but his movement dropped a hunk of steak to the ground. He considered the fallen food for a moment, then looked back to Leo.
"That's my food!"
Leo was laughing too hard to hear him. He headed back into the shop; Gary shook his head in amazement at Danny's unending appetite - and yet, Danny was by far the slimmest of the group - and joined Leo. Twenty minutes. The reprieve was over.
Gary's thoughts were on the tournament as he headed back towards the grinding room. He liked that Leo, and many others, wanted him to play, considering their interest a payoff for the many hours he put in at the local gym. He was big and strong, six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, and he could hit a Softball a long, long way. That didn't count for much by Gary's estimation, but it apparently did in many other people's eyes - and Gary had