End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  If they managed that—if they managed it without fussing about it, without even thinking much about it—they’d be proper leathernecks.

  Dillon couldn’t remember how he’d absorbed the lessons he needed to have. He knew damn well they’d been in place before he ever went Over There. What he saw in France, what he did there, only confirmed what he’d already had.

  “Sergeant?” one of the boots said.

  “Yeah?” Dillon growled—he wanted them to think he was God, and an angry God at that.

  “This is fun!” the youngster said.

  That flummoxed Dillon. In all his years in the Corps, he didn’t think he’d ever heard the like. “It’s not supposed to be fun, goddammit,” he said after that momentary amazement. “This isn’t a picnic. It isn’t a lark. Those Nip assholes are gonna fuckin’ kill you if they get half a chance. They’re good at it. That means we gotta be even better. You hear me, maggot?”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” the boot bellowed. You hear me? had to be answered at top volume, lest worse befall.

  Worse would bloody well befall here any which way. “Drop down and give me fifty pushups,” Dillon growled. “Fun, my ass!”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” the boot shouted again. He was a big, blond, wide-faced kid named Kowalski. Fifty pushups in the rain, in the mud, with a heavy pack on his back, were no joke. He was filthy and damn near dead by the time he finished them. Dillon wasn’t sure he could have done them himself. Kowalski, though, plainly would sooner have died for real than failed. That was a Marine’s way of thinking, too. He bounced to his feet after the last one, panting and scarlet but ready to go on with the march.

  “Still having fun?” Dillon asked him.

  By his expression, the kid wanted to say yes. But he wasn’t—quite—that dumb. “No, Sergeant!” he said loudly.

  “Okay,” Dillon said. “Get it in gear.”

  After a hot shower and a clean uniform, he told the story that evening over a beer in the NCOs’ club. Dutch Wenzel shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Fun?” he said. “What the fuck is the world coming to?”

  “Beats me,” Dillon answered. “How much fun will he think it is when his pal gets shot in the guts? How much fun will he think it is when he does? It’s a job, for Chrissake. We gotta do it, and we gotta do it right, but fun? For crying out loud, Dutch!”

  “Easy, man—easy.” Wenzel raised a placating hand. “You’re preaching to the choir here.”

  “Okay, okay. It rocked me, though, I tell you.” Les shook his head, too. He still couldn’t get over it. “Fun!”

  “Don’t blame you,” Dutch said. “Even for a boot, that’s pushing it. Hey—I heard something pretty good, though.”

  “Tell me,” Dillon urged. “Maybe it’ll help me get the taste of this out of my mouth.”

  “I hear we launched a new carrier,” Dutch told him. “Gotta start making up for what the Japs nailed last summer.”

  Les nodded. “That’s a fact—and you’re right; that is good news. What are they calling this one?”

  “Essex,” Wenzel answered. “There are supposed to be more in the pipeline, too.”

  “There’d better be,” Dillon said. “You gotta figure we’re going to lose some on the way in. We need to smash whatever they’ve got and have enough left over to handle their land-based air. If we don’t, we shouldn’t even start.”

  “Yeah, well, you know that, and I know that, but do they know it back in Washington?” Wenzel said.

  “Beats me,” Dillon said. “I’ll tell you one thing, though—we’re gonna find out.”

  JANE ARMITAGE FOUND IT HARD to believe 1943 was more than a month old. Christmas and New Year’s had passed quietly. What was there to celebrate? And one day, one month, here was a lot like another. Oh, it was a little warmer in the summer, a little rainier in the winter, but, both times, only a little. She remembered Ohio. You didn’t have any trouble telling summer from winter in Columbus. In Wahiawa, you could lose track without a calendar.

  Flowers bloomed. Butterflies danced and bees buzzed. Snow? When the school was open, she’d had to teach special lessons about snow. The third-graders couldn’t have understood half the Christmas carols if she hadn’t.

  Downtown Wahiawa, such as it was, had suffered since the Japanese took over. All the stores that sold new clothes, new dishes, new furniture—new anything, when you got right down to it—had gone belly-up. New stuff had come from the mainland, and nothing came to Hawaii from the mainland any more except the occasional airplane full of bombs. Much as Jane approved of those, she didn’t want to buy one and take it back to the apartment.

  Secondhand places, now . . . Those flourished. If you wanted a toaster or a dress or something to read, you got it secondhand. Used goods, if not abundant, were at least available. Jane sometimes felt like a ghoul when she sorted through them, for a lot of them came from the households of people who’d died in the fighting. But what could you do? Those luckless souls had no further use for their goods, and the people who were still alive desperately needed them.

  When Jane saw a copy of Murder Must Advertise in the secondhand-book shop, she had all she could do not to jump for joy. She liked mysteries in general and Dorothy Sayers in particular, and she’d never read that one. Showing eagerness, though, would have run up the price. Nothing was fixed these days; everything depended on how much the seller thought he—or, in this case, she—thought the buyer would part with.

  Jane picked up a cookbook she didn’t particularly want. Cookbooks made good cover; everyone was obsessed with food these days. She poked around through the store before casually adding the mystery to the cookbook. “How much for these two, Louise?” she asked.

  Louise’s jaw worked. She might have been chewing gum, except there was no gum to chew. “Fifteen dollars,” she said after making whatever arcane calculations she made. Those calculations worked. She wasn’t as skinny as most people in Wahiawa.

  “Fifteen?” Jane squeaked. “That’s outrageous!” And it was. She hadn’t expected Louise to say more than ten.

  The bookstore owner shrugged. She chewed on the gum that wasn’t there. “Twelve, then,” she said reluctantly, “and you won’t jew me down another dime.”

  “I’m not made out of money,” Jane protested. Louise shrugged again. Jane asked, “How much for each of them?” That boiled down to, how well had she hidden her reaction when she saw Murder Must Advertise? If Louise thought she was mostly after the cookbook, she won. If the other woman knew she wanted the mystery, she didn’t.

  Still more jaw-working followed. Louise was calculating what the traffic would bear. “Eight for this one, four for the other,” she said at last.

  She wanted more for the cookbook. Jane didn’t cheer, even if she felt like it. Instead, she looked disappointed. “That’s too much,” she said, sending a longing glance toward the book full of recipes for Chinese chicken wings and Polynesian pork chops and bananas on the half shell and fish with pineapple sauce and suffering bastards.

  “Take it or leave it.” Louise had the business manners of a snapping turtle.

  Sighing, Jane put the cookbook back on the table where she’d found it. “I guess I can afford this one,” she said, tapping the mystery. “I sure wish you’d done it the other way, though.”

  Louise looked smug. Jane gave her a five-dollar bill and got back two halves in change. She left the store in a hurry, before Louise figured out she was really ready to jump for joy.

  The Japs had confiscated radios. A bomb had fallen on the local movie house. Making time go by was one of the hardest things you could do these days. A good book would kill several hours. If it was good enough, you could read it more than once, too. Jane could hardly wait to get back to her place, open up the novel, and be transported from Oahu to a larger, cooler, foggier isle.

  But she hadn’t slipped the surly bonds of reality yet. Up the street came a work gang of American POWs herded along by Japanese guards with bayoneted rifles. Sh
e eyed them with horrified fascination. As always, they reminded her how things could have been worse.

  She was thin. They were emaciated. Her clothes were worn. They still had on the tattered remnants of whatever they’d been wearing when they surrendered. She made do with cold-water showers without soap. By the way they looked—and smelled—they hadn’t bathed for more than a year. Some of them stood defiantly erect, and marched as if on parade at Schofield Barracks. Others, plainly, were on their last legs, and could barely stagger along.

  One of them fell down in the middle of the street. Two Japanese guards stood over him, screaming what had to be curses. When he didn’t get up, they started kicking him. They paused after a minute or so to see if he would rise. He tried, but couldn’t get past his knees. They kicked him some more and paused again. When he still didn’t get up, two of them bayoneted him. He groaned and thrashed and bled.

  Jane’s nails were short these days—whose weren’t?—but they bit into her palms anyhow. The Japs didn’t put the POW out of his misery. They left him there to die slowly. Then, laughing, they got the rest of the prisoners moving again.

  It wasn’t Fletch, Jane thought as she willed her hands to uncurl. Whenever prisoners of war went through Wahiawa, she couldn’t help scanning their faces to see if she spotted her ex-husband. As decrepit and shaggy as the POWs were these days, he might have stumbled past her without her even recognizing him. She wondered why she bothered. She had no idea whether he was alive. She didn’t love him any more. Even if she did, what could she do for him? Nothing. Less than nothing. And if the Japs here found out she was an officer’s wife—even if she and Fletch had been getting a divorce—they might make things unpleasant for her. More unpleasant, she thought with a shiver.

  But she couldn’t help looking. Getting a divorce wasn’t as final as lawyers made it out to be. She wished it were.

  By the time the guards were out of sight, the prisoner they’d butchered had stopped moving. Sooner or later, someone would drag the body out of the street. Jane looked away from it as she scurried back to her apartment. What worried her was how little the atrocity upset her. She’d already seen too many others.

  MARCHING UP THE KAMEHAMEHA HIGHWAY was more fun than paving it or building gun emplacements for the Japs. That was how Fletcher Armitage measured his life these days. He wasn’t quite so exhausted when he marched as when he worked. He didn’t starve quite so quickly, either. These were things to treasure, though he wouldn’t have thought so before December 7, 1941.

  He understood Einstein better than he’d ever dreamt of doing. There was bad, and then there was worse. What would have looked like the worst thing in the world to him before the Japs overran Oahu now didn’t seem bad at all. If that wasn’t relativity, what the hell was it?

  When the POWs worked, the guards pushed them hard. Why not? The Japs didn’t do any road work or digging themselves. But when they marched, the pace stayed bearable. If the Japs made the prisoners doubletime, they would have to doubletime themselves, and they wouldn’t have cared for that one bit. A few of them were actually plump.

  Fletch’s standards about what constituted a proper human form had changed radically since the surrender—so radically, he didn’t altogether realize it himself. The Americans with whom he labored seemed normal to him. They were, after all, the people he saw every minute of every day. He forgot how scrawny they were because they surrounded him.

  But they made the Japs, some of whom were prewar average and a handful even heavier than that, seem grotesquely obese by comparison. Why didn’t they fall over dead from carting that extra weight around all the time?

  Intellectually, Fletch knew he’d had that much flesh himself once upon a time. Emotionally, he didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it. If everyone who mattered to him seemed made of sticks and twigs, then anyone who didn’t had to have something wrong with him.

  “Wahiawa ahead,” somebody said.

  “Hot damn.” That wasn’t Fletch; it was a Texan named Virgil Street. He added, “Who gives a damn, anyways? We went through this lousy place fallin’ back when we still had guns in our hands. Goin’ through it forwards doesn’t mean anything, on account of the Japs got the guns now.”

  Fletch kept his mouth shut. Wahiawa meant something to him. He wondered if he’d see Jane. He also wondered if she’d care if she saw him. Not likely, he feared. He never had figured out why she dumped him. He hadn’t seen it coming. (That he hadn’t seen it coming said a good deal about him, but one of the things it said was that he wouldn’t understand what it said.) He still loved her, as much as he had before. If only . . .

  He laughed. He had a picture of the Jap sergeant who bossed the work gang letting him fall out for a heart-to-heart with his ex. It was right next to his pictures of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

  And even if the sergeant did, would Jane listen to him? That was another fat chance. She hadn’t wanted to hear a word he said, not after she threw him out of the apartment. Suddenly and powerfully, he wanted a drink. Thinking of Jane made him think of bourbon. He’d done a hell of a lot of drinking after she dumped him. What with forcibly separating him from hooch, the Japanese invasion might have saved him from turning into a lush.

  “Shit,” he muttered. Without even thinking, he could have named a dozen pretty damn good officers, all the way up to bird colonel, who drank like fish. If that wasn’t a great Army tradition, he didn’t know what was. He would sooner have sacrificed his liver for his country than what he was going through now.

  As the POWs came into Wahiawa, the guards strung themselves out along either side of the slow-moving column. When they were out in the country, the guards mostly relaxed. Prisoners couldn’t very well run, and couldn’t disappear for long. Here, though, there were side streets to duck down, houses and apartments to break into, all sorts of places to hide. The Japs weren’t dummies. They could figure that out as well as white men could.

  They could do all kinds of things as well as white men could, and maybe better. Back before the shooting started, Fletch wouldn’t have believed it, any more than any other U.S. Army officer would have. To him, Japs had been little bucktoothed monkeys who could turn out cheap copies of just about anything, but who flew planes made from tin cans and didn’t have the balls to fight a real war.

  He knew better now. He laughed again, bitterly. One whole hell of a lot knowing did him!

  “One run, nine die!” shouted a corporal who spoke English of a sort. Everybody in each shooting squad automatically looked around to see where the other men whose fate was tied to his were and what they were doing. Each squad had one or two guys reckoned less reliable than the others. You wanted to be sure they couldn’t light out for the tall timber.

  Fletch caught Street’s eye. They nodded to each other. Everything seemed under control. If anybody held their shooting squad together, they were the ones. Fletch had an idea about how to lead, having been an officer. Street was a man who commanded respect regardless of rank. There were soldiers like that. Fletch was glad the two of them got along.

  Into Wahiawa they came. Civilians on the street bowed to the approaching Japanese. That was ingrained into everybody by now: local Japs, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinamen, haoles. You had to show respect. The world hadn’t shown Japan respect before, and everybody was paying for it now.

  Wahiawa looked poor. It looked like a mainland town where the factory had closed down and everybody’d been out of work for a long time. Everybody wore shabby clothes—not so bad as the rags the prisoners had on, but shabby. People looked fearful, too, as if expecting something worse would happen if they weren’t careful. They were bound to be right, too.

  “You move!” the corporal yelled, hustling them along.

  Move Fletch did. If he didn’t move, they would bayonet him on the street and laugh while they did it. His legs and especially his feet hurt. He kept telling himself it was only because he’d done too much work for too long on too little food. He k
ept telling himself that, yes, but he had more and more trouble making himself believe it. He was starting to get beriberi. Not only weren’t they feeding him enough, they were feeding him the wrong kind of not enough.

  A blond woman on the sidewalk bowed to the Jap soldiers. Was that Jane? Excitement, then dejection—it wasn’t. This gal was older and tougher-looking. He’d seen worse, though. He laughed at himself. His interest in women right now had to be purely theoretical. He didn’t think he could get it up if he had a crane to help.

  He laughed again. “What’s funny?” Virgil Street asked. Anything that made a day go by a trifle better was to be cherished. Fletch explained. The other POW snorted. “Hell, buddy, way we are now, a clapped-out fifty-cent whore’d turn up her nose at us even if we could get it up.”

  “Ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Fletch looked down at himself. He doubted he weighed a hundred twenty pounds, and at least ten pounds of that were dirt. Along with everybody else in this sorry outfit, he smelled like the monkey house in the zoo. He would have killed for a sirloin, a baked potato, and pie à la mode. Hedy Lamarr dancing the dance of love in the altogether? Forget about it.

  And then he did see Jane, and he stumbled and almost fell on his face. He recognized the sun dress she had on; she’d bought it on a shopping trip down to Honolulu, and crowed about the price for days. She was very tan. Her hands looked like hell; they were almost as battered as his own.

  She saw him, too. Her jaw dropped. Her mouth shaped an O. Her eyes widened. She didn’t say a thing, though. He started to scream her name—he started to, but caught himself before anything more than a gurgle escaped his lips. If he showed he knew who she was, what would happen to her? She’d catch it from the Japs, odds were.

  She’s alive, anyway, and she doesn’t look too bad. Maybe she’d started to call him, too. If she had, she also had too much sense to finish. I love you, he mouthed, and wondered if she could read lips.