Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

George enjoyed the dolphins for their own sake. They were swift and graceful and, as always, they looked as if they were having a good time out there. “I wonder what they make of us,” he said. “Till we got ships like this, they were some of the biggest, toughest things in the ocean.”

“They figure we’re good for a handout, anyway,” Dalby said, which was true. They would follow ships for scraps and garbage. Sometimes, though, they would track ships for what looked like nothing more than the hell of it. Were they skylarking? Did they really have the brains to play? More to the point, did they have the brains not to want to work? For their sake, George hoped so.

Four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew for the twin 40mm mount replaced Dalby’s, George went below, grabbed himself a couple of sandwiches and some coffee, and then found his hammock. He laughed as he climbed up into it. “What’s so funny?” asked another sailor about to grab some shut-eye.

“Used to be I couldn’t sleep for beans in one of these goddamn things,” George answered. “Used to be I couldn’t hardly get into one without falling out on my ear. But now I don’t even think about it.”

“That’s ’cause you’re a real Navy guy now,” the other sailor said, getting up into his hammock as nimbly as a chimp might have. “You know how to do shit. You aren’t a little lost civilian anymore, looking for somebody to hold your hand and tell you what to do.”

Was I really that green? George wondered, wiggling to get comfortable. He supposed he had been. He knew the sea from his fisherman days, but knowing the sea and knowing the Navy weren’t the same thing-not even close. He settled his cap over his eyes. Two minutes later, he was snoring.

Standing watch and watch wore on a man. He felt groggy, almost underwater, when he slid out of the hammock and down to the deck again. He got rid of some of the coffee he’d drunk just after he came off the last watch, then went back to the galley for more. It might help keep him conscious, anyway.

Fremont Dalby was at the gun when he got there. The CPO looked fresh and fit. Maybe Dalby didn’t need to sleep. George yawned. He damn well did, and he hadn’t done enough of it. “All quiet?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Dalby answered. “We’re getting up toward Midway, too.”

“Uh-huh.” George looked north and west, as if he expected the atoll to come over the horizon any minute now. He didn’t; they weren’t that close, not by three or four hundred miles. “Anything from the Y-range?”

“Quiet as a mouse, far as I know,” Dalby said. “Way it looks to me is, the Japs haven’t got a carrier operating south of the island.”

“Makes sense,” George agreed. “If they did, they would’ve figured out we’re around by now. Hell, we’re almost close enough for land-based air from Midway to spot us.”

“ Almost is the word,” the gun chief said. “And if they don’t have a carrier operating south of Midway, we really have made them pull in their horns. Us coming up here is a lot better than them bombing the crap out of Oahu.”

“You better believe it,” George said. “It’d be good if we could push ’em off Midway, too. Where would they go then?”

“Wake,” Fremont Dalby replied at once. “It’s another pissant little bird turd of an island southwest of Midway. But I’ll be damned if I’d want to hop from island to island across the whole stinking Pacific toward Japan.”

“Oh, good God, no!” George shuddered at the very idea. “You’d have to be crazy to try something like that. You’d have to be crazy to want to. As long as they get out of the Sandwich Islands and stay away, that’s plenty. This is a big goddamn ocean. There’s room enough for us and them.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Dalby said. “Of course, how it looks to Philadelphia is anybody’s guess. The big brains back there can screw up anything if they put their minds to it. Minds!” He rolled his eyes. “If they had any, we’d all be better off.”

“Treason,” Fritz Gustafson said. “Off with your head.”

Dalby suggested that the loader lose some other organ important for happiness, if not absolutely necessary for personal survival. Gustafson didn’t say another word. He’d got his lick in, and he was content.

George’s watch passed quietly. No warning shouts of approaching Japanese airplanes came from the loudspeakers. The hydrophones didn’t pick up telltale noises from lurking Japanese submersibles. No torpedoes from lurking submersibles the hydrophone hadn’t picked up arrowed through the water toward the Townsend.

When the other crew took over the gun, George went down to the galley for more sandwiches and coffee. He felt as if he’d done the same thing just a few hours earlier. Of course, he had done the same thing, so no wonder he felt that way. These sandwiches were ham on wheat, not corned beef on rye. Other than that, he might have been running the film over again. Standing watch and watch made time blur. George tried to come up with the name of the artist who’d painted the pocket watch sagging and melting as if it were left out in the rain. It was something foreign, that was all he could remember.

Yawning, he headed for his hammock. “Here we go again,” he said as he climbed up into it.

The sailor he’d talked with the last time he sacked out laughed. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will get suspicious.”

George laughed, too, a little nervously. Was that just a joke, or did something faggoty hide underneath it? Aboard ship, you always wondered. The Townsend went back to Oahu often enough to let the crew get their ashes hauled on Hotel Street, but you wondered anyway. Some guys were flat-out queers, no two ways about it, and they couldn’t have cared less about the floozies on Hotel Street.

But you couldn’t call somebody on what was probably nothing but a harmless joke. If the other guy didn’t make another like it, George figured he would forget about this one. If he did… I’ll worry about that later. With another yawn, an enormous one, George decided to worry about everything later, and went to sleep.

Night had fallen when he came back up on deck with another mug of coffee. It was cool and quiet: no CAP after dark. Fremont Dalby got to the 40mm mount with a mug of his own. He nodded to George and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Him, too? “Uh, yeah,” George said. He could imagine a lot of things, but the gun chief as a homo? Never in a million years.

“Should be a little easier this time through,” Dalby said. “We don’t have airplanes coming at us with bombs or torpedoes during the night.”

“Or trying to crash into us, either,” George put in.

“Yeah, that was fun, wasn’t it?” Dalby said. Fun wasn’t the word George would have used. He didn’t know which one he would have used, but it wasn’t one he would see in any family newspaper.

“All we gotta worry about now is submarines,” Fritz Gustafson said. As usual, the loader didn’t talk much. Also as usual, he got a lot of mileage out of what he did say.

Fremont Dalby’s suggestion about what submarines could do was illegal, immoral, and impossible. George stared out over the black waters of the Pacific. Starlight glittered off the sea, but the moon was down. A dozen submersibles could have been playing ring around the rosy half a mile from the Townsend and he never would have known it. Out in the tropical Atlantic, a Confederate boat had sneaked up on his father’s destroyer and sunk it in the middle of the night. The same thing could happen to him. At times like this, he knew it much too well.