End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  FLETCHER ARMITAGE FILLED OUT HIS UNIFORM better than he had the last time he came into Wahiawa. Looking at himself in the mirror, comparing himself to people who hadn’t almost starved to death, he judged he was all the way up to very skinny. From where he’d started, that showed a hell of a lot of progress.

  Wahiawa had made progress, too. They’d bulldozed rubble off the streets. Some of the long-dead automobiles parked along Kamehameha Highway were gone, too. More people were on the sidewalk. Like Fletch, they had more flesh than the last time he was here.

  He tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Why don’t you park?”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” the soldier answered cheerfully. He pulled over. Several big trucks painted olive drab rumbled by, heading south. Fletch wondered what they were carrying to Honolulu or Pearl Harbor. Both places still needed everything under the sun. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. His worries were right here.

  Walking to the apartment where he’d lived with Jane was easier this time. He didn’t get tired so fast. Exercise was starting to feel good again. He wasn’t doing too much without the strength to do it, the way he had while he was a POW. No Jap sergeant was going to whack him with a length of bamboo or a rifle butt if he slowed down, either.

  But he didn’t have to slow down now. He went up the stairs at a good clip. He did raise his hand twice before he knocked on the door, but that was nerves, not weakness. So he told himself, anyway.

  She won’t be home, he thought. But the door opened. “Oh,” Jane said. “It’s you. Come in.” She stepped aside to let him.

  “You were expecting Cary Grant?” he asked with a crooked smile.

  Jane laughed—sourly. “I wasn’t expecting anybody. People know I had to do . . . what I did. But they know I did it, too. They don’t come around much.” She closed the door, then turned to look him over. “You seem better. You don’t look like you’d blow away in a strong breeze any more.”

  “I put a roll of quarters in my pocket before I came down, just to make sure,” Fletch answered. This time, Jane really laughed. His eyes traveled her. “You’ve always looked good to me, babe.”

  She stared down at the ratty rug. “Even after all that?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “I know about doing things you wouldn’t do if you had a choice. Believe me, I do. The tank traps and bunkers and trenches I dug probably got our guys killed after they came back. You think I wanted to do that? But the Japs would’ve murdered me if I told ’em no, so—I dug.”

  Jane took that in a direction he hadn’t expected, murmuring, “Killed.” She eyed him. “Have you ever killed anybody? Known you killed somebody, I mean?”

  Artillerymen usually fought at ranges where they couldn’t see what happened when their shells came down—usually, but not always. He’d used a 105 as a direct-fire weapon when the Japs invaded Oahu. “Yeah,” he said, and told her about blowing an enemy tank to hell and gone. Then he asked, “How come?”

  “Because I did, too, or I think I did.” She told him about Annabelle Chung. “While I was doing it, it felt like the right thing. Sometimes it still does. But sometimes I just want to be sick, you know what I mean?”

  “If anybody ever had it coming, babe, she did,” Fletch said. “You weren’t the only one who thought so, either, if it makes you feel any better.”

  Jane nodded. “I tell myself that. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t.” She made a wry face. “The last couple of years, a lot of things have happened that can’t be helped.”

  “Ain’t it the truth!” Fletch said with more feeling than grammar. “But maybe some can.” Awkwardly, he dropped to one knee. “Hon, since the divorce never got finished, will you please stay married to me?”

  Jane stared at him. Then she started to laugh again. “You didn’t do that the first time you proposed to me!”

  “Well, I know you better now, and I mean it more, too,” he said. “And I’ll try to be a better husband, too. I won’t promise the moon, but I’ll try. So will you?”

  “Get up, silly,” she said softly. “Will I?” She seemed to be asking him as much as herself. Slowly, she nodded. “I think I will, if you’re crazy enough to still want me. We’ll see how it goes, I guess. And if it doesn’t . . . one of us’ll file papers again, that’s all.”

  “Sure.” Fletch agreed more because he didn’t feel like arguing than because he wanted to think about papers and lawyers and all the other delights he’d known just before the Japs invaded. But he’d known other delights since; next to time as a Japanese prisoner, even lawyers didn’t look so bad. Next to hell, purgatory probably seemed a pretty nice part of town. He grunted a little as he got to his feet. “Thank you, babe!”

  “Don’t thank me yet, Fletch,” Jane said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re still on probation. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, I will go back to a lawyer.” She eyed him with mock—he hoped it was mock—severity. “That’s a threat, buster. You’re not supposed to grin like a fool after I make a threat.”

  “No, huh? Not even when I’m happy?” Fletch pulled the corners of his mouth down, using one index finger for each corner. “There. Is that better?” he asked, blurrily, fingers still in place.

  Jane snorted. “So help me God, you’re crazy as a bedbug.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Fletch saluted her with as much precision as if he were a plebe back at West Point. “May I please kiss the bride to be, wife to be, whatever-the-heck to be, ma’am?”

  Most of the time, after you’d just more or less proposed and she said yes, the answer to that was automatic. Looking at Jane’s face, he knew it wasn’t here. When he remembered why, some of his own joy chilled within him. But she nodded after a couple of seconds. “Carefully,” she said.

  “Carefully,” he promised.

  He held her with as much formal reserve as if they were waltzing together for the first time. She closed her eyes and raised her chin, looking about one-quarter eager and three-quarters scared to death. He kissed her. It was more than a brush of his lips across hers, but less than half of what he wanted it to be: the same sort of kiss he’d given her the last time he came back here.

  When it was over, he let her go right away. “Okay?” he asked.

  She nodded again. “Okay. Thank you.” She looked out the window, across the room—anywhere but at him. “This won’t be easy. I’m sorry. If you want to change your mind, I can see why you would.”

  “Not me,” he said. “I figured there’d be bumps in the road. But hey—at least there’s a road. The last couple of years . . .” He didn’t go on, or need to. “So let’s do like you said—we’ll see how it goes, and we’ll go from there. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Jane held out her hand.

  Fletch shook it. “And I brought you another present, too.” He pulled out two packs of Luckies.

  “Wow!” She all but snatched them out of his hands. “The way things are, they’re better than roses.” She opened a pack and stuck a cigarette in her mouth. He lit it for her. “Wow!” she said again after the first drag.

  “I better go,” Fletch said. She didn’t tell him to stay, however much he wished she would have. He paused with his hand on the knob. “One more thing. If they ship me out—no, when they ship me out—I’ll be paying those bastards back for you.”

  “Yeah.” Jane took another deep drag on the Lucky. “That’s a deal, too, Fletch.”

  AUTUMN. For more than thirty years, it had been only a word to Jiro Takahashi. It was always summer in Hawaii. A little warmer, a little cooler, a little drier, a little wetter—so what? Summer, endless summer.

  But now, against all odds, he was back in Japan, and he had to remember what seasons were like. Southern Honshu had always prided itself on its good weather, with the Inland Sea helping to keep things moderate. Jiro supposed it wasn’t as bad here as it was up in Hokkaido, where they got real blizzards every winter. It still seemed chilly and nasty to him.

  I’ve been spoiled, he thou
ght.

  The authorities were doing their best to keep him happy. His broadcasts from Hawaii had made him something of a celebrity in the home islands. A grumpy celebrity wasn’t good.

  He thought he would have been happier if they’d let him stay next door in Yamaguchi Prefecture, where he’d been born. He’d visited his old village. He had a brother and a sister there, and a few old acquaintances. It proved more awkward than he’d expected; no one knew what to say. After so many years apart, he didn’t have much in common with family or former friends.

  Maybe the people who ran things were smart to keep him in a big city. He could visit again whenever he wanted to—if he wanted to. Yamaguchi Prefecture remained overwhelmingly rural. It was livelier than it had been when he left, but next to the hustle and bustle he’d known in Honolulu it seemed, if not dead, then very, very sleepy.

  For instance, it had no town with first-rate broadcasting facilities. They wanted to keep him on the radio, as if his broadcasts could somehow compensate for the loss of Hawaii. Nobody ever came right out and said Hawaii was lost; it just stopped showing up in the news. Jiro hoped his sons had come through the fighting. He also hoped they were happy under American rule once more. He knew he wouldn’t have been—and he knew the Americans wouldn’t have been happy with him.

  He got off the trolley at the stop closest to the studio. It was only a block or two from the domed Industrial Promotion Hall in the center of town. When he looked north, the Chugoku-sanshi Range loomed over the city skyline. The mountains didn’t have snow on them yet, but they would by the time winter was over. He hadn’t even seen snow since coming to Oahu. He supposed seeing it wasn’t so bad. Dealing with it . . . If he had to, he had to, that was all.

  “Hello, Takahashi-san.” The local broadcaster’s name was Junchiro Hozumi. He reminded Jiro of a cheap imitation of Osami Murata. He cracked crude, stupid jokes and breathed in your face to show how friendly he was. He did have a smooth baritone, though. He said, “Today shall we talk about how you came back to Japan?”

  Jiro thought about that. He remembered how terribly overcrowded the submarine was, and how the stink almost knocked you off your feet. He remembered the heart-pounding fear as the boat sneaked, submerged, past the American ships that had by then surrounded Oahu. He remembered the shrill pings of the enemy’s echo-tracker, and the crash and boom of bursting depth charges. He remembered how the submarine shook, as if in an undersea earthquake. And he remembered how fear turned to terror.

  Did Hozumi understand what he was asking? Did he want his listeners hearing things like that? What would the government do to him—and to Jiro— if they went out over the air? Nothing good; Jiro was sure of that. As tactfully as he could, he said, “Maybe we’d better pick something else, Hozumi-san.”

  For a wonder, Hozumi got the message. His grin was wide and friendly and showed a gold front tooth. “Whatever you say. How about being able to eat proper rice now that you’re in the home islands again?”

  “All right. We can do that,” Jiro said. The rice here was better than the horrible slop he’d eaten after the occupation started. The ration was larger than the one people on Oahu had got, too—not a whole lot larger, but larger. He could talk about that and let people here think he was talking about the whole time he’d lived in Hawaii. He’d begun to understand how the game was played.

  The studio reminded him of the one at KGMB from which he and Murata had broadcast. The routine seemed much the same, too. Had the Japanese borrowed from the Americans? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Even the engineers’ signals through the glass were the same.

  “Good job,” Hozumi said when the program was done. “Good job!”

  “Arigato,” Jiro said. He’d got through another one, anyhow.

  When he left the studio, he took the trolley down to the shore and stared out across the Inland Sea at Itaku Shima, the Island of Light. From time out of mind, the tiny island had been dedicated to the goddess Bentin. The chief temple was more than 1,300 years old. Pilgrims came to visit from all over Japan.

  Hawaii didn’t have anything like that. Jiro nodded to himself. Even if the weather here couldn’t match what he’d left, Hiroshima wasn’t such a bad place after all.