Faithless Post

An unprecedented crisis hit the Pentagon last week. A post belonging to one Air Force command had just moved under its own power into territory assigned to another command. What to do? The Air Force paper-pushers had nothing in their files to guide them.

The post was an eight-man weather station on Fletcher's Island, a great mass of ice floating in the Arctic Ocean. It was discovered more than two years ago by the Alaskan Air Command, and colonized last March with assorted weathermen, scientists and communication experts. Then, moving eastward at 2 1/2 miles a day, it floated into the jurisdiction of the Northeast Air Command.

The Alaskan airmen did not put up much of a fight. After a tricky deployment of Pentagon charts of organization, the ice men became naturalized employees of the Northeast Air Command (headquarters: Pepperrell Air Force Base, Newfoundland). If Fletcher's Island continues to creep far enough eastward, it will eventually enter the territory of some Soviet air command. Then the Air Force guardian of lines of demarcation will have a trickier problem.

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