Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

It wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t too cold. From everything he’d heard, it never got too hot or too cold. The air was moist without being oppressively sticky, the way it got in Boston in the summertime. It could rain at any time of the day or night all year around, but it rarely rained hard. The hills north of Honolulu were impossibly green, the sky improbably blue, the Pacific bluer still.

“I don’t just want to be stationed here,” George said. “I want to live here.”

“In a little grass shack?” Dalby jeered.

“Why not?” George said. “You don’t need anything more than that.”

Civilians started getting on as the trolley stopped here and there. The sailors eyed them suspiciously. Some were Orientals, and how could you tell if the Japs were loyal to the USA? And quite a few of the whites, especially the older ones, spoke with British accents. They probably wouldn’t be sorry to see the United States booted out of Honolulu, either.

Well, too bad, George thought. It’s not going to happen. He hoped it wouldn’t, anyway. The place where the islands were vulnerable was their dependence on the mainland for food and fuel. If the Japanese could cut off supplies, holding them might not be easy no matter what the actual battle situation looked like.

Then the trolley got into Honolulu, and he stopped worrying about things like that. The city had a filigreed, before-the-Great-War feeling to it. Not a whole lot had been built during the American occupation. The hotels that had accommodated visitors before the new war shut down tourism were the ones that had accommodated them before 1914.

Even the red-light district had been there a long time. The saloons and tattoo parlors and “hotels” that greeted sailors and soldiers had the look of places that might have greeted their grandfathers. The lurid neon signs a lot of them sported seemed afterthoughts, not essentials.

“We need a few drinks,” Fremont Dalby declared, and nobody presumed to disagree with him. He swaggered into a dive called the Swizzle Stick. The rest of the gun crew followed.

Dalby ordered whiskey. Most of the other sailors followed suit. George and Fritz Gustafson got beers instead. “What do you want to go and do that for?” somebody asked. “Haven’t you got better things to do with your dick than piss through it?”

“It’s good for both,” Gustafson said, which quelled that in a hurry.

Some of the barmaids were white, others Oriental. They were all female, and wore low-cut white blouses and short black skirts. Seeing them reminded George how long it had been since he’d set eyes on a woman, let alone touched one. He stared down at his glass of beer. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Connie-but he didn’t want to go without loving, either.

The facsimile of loving you could buy for money wasn’t as good as the real thing. You didn’t need to be an egghead to figure that out. It was a lot better than nothing, though. Was it enough better than nothing to make him decide to do it? That’s the question, he thought, and chewed on it as hard as Hamlet had grappled with To be or not to be.

He didn’t have to choose right away. They weren’t going anywhere for a while. Some of the sailors had already knocked back their whiskeys. They were waving their glasses for refills. George didn’t feel like drinking that fast. If he drank that fast, he’d get drunk. If he got drunk, he’d do something stupid. He could feel that coming like a rash. And if he did something stupid and he wasn’t lucky, he’d end up with a goddamn rash, too.

But his glass emptied, as if by magic. “You want another?” a slant-eyed, tawny-skinned barmaid asked. George found himself nodding. The next beer appeared in short order. It vanished in short order, too. So did the one after that, and the one after that. About then, George stopped counting them.

Fremont Dalby got to his feet. Considering how much he’d put down, that he could get to his feet proved he was made of stern stuff. “The time has come,” he declared, “and we’re damn well going to. Drink up, you bastards.”

George knew all the reasons he didn’t want to go to a brothel. He knew, all right, but he’d stopped caring. Connie was five thousand miles away-a lot farther if he had to sail it. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Dalby’s words came back to him, handy as could be. Everybody who went to stand in one of those lines told himself the same thing. If he drank enough beforehand, he might even make himself believe it.

The line moved forward at a good clip. “They hustle guys in and out, don’t they?” George said. The rest of the gun crew laughed as if that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. George had to listen to himself before he realized what kind of joke he’d made. Then he laughed, too.

It cost three dollars, payable in advance. He didn’t even get to choose a girl. He got assigned a cubicle. He went to it and there she lay, already naked on the bed. She was plump, and had black hair; she might have been part Oriental. “Hurry up,” she said. “You only got five minutes.”

He wondered if he’d drunk too much to perform. He quickly discovered he hadn’t. And, speaking of quickly, it was over almost before it began. He didn’t need to worry about spending too much time in the nasty little room. That was it? he thought as he did up his pants. I got all hot and bothered about that? He had, too.

Whoever had designed the place knew his business. The exit funneled customers into a pro station. Taking care of prophylaxis against venereal disease-something new for George-proved nastier than the brief coupling had been enjoyable. When he said so to a pharmacist’s mate, the fellow shrugged and asked, “Would you rather have VD?”

“Couldn’t be worse than this,” George said.

“Shows what you know. Shows you never tried pissing through a dose of the clap, too.” The pharmacist’s mate jerked a thumb toward the door at the far end of the room. “I ain’t got time to argue with you. Go on, get the hell out of here.”

Out George went. The sordidness of what he’d just been through far outweighed the pleasure. The spasm of drunken guilt he felt didn’t help, either. If Connie ever finds out, she’ll murder me. I’ll have it coming, too.

Most of the other men from the gun crew were already out on the sidewalk. Some of them seemed as subdued as George. Not Fremont Dalby, though. “Twice!” he bragged.

Two times nothing is still nothing, George thought. Then he blinked. He’d never been anything special in school. He wouldn’t have bet he remembered how multiplying by zero worked, not in a million years. Things came back in the strangest ways.

There were times when Brigadier General Abner Dowling suspected he must have been a fire brigade in some past life. Not a member of a fire brigade, but a whole brigade all by himself. That was the only thing that could explain how many fires he’d put out in his long career in the U.S. Army.

More than ten years as adjutant to General George Armstrong Custer made a good start-or a bad one, depending on how you looked at things. Custer was the hero of the Great War, but no man was a hero to his adjutant, any more than he was to his valet. Dowling knew too well how vain, how stubborn, how petulant the old fool was… and how those qualities went a long way toward making him the man who, in spite of everything-including himself-made the decisions that ended up beating the Confederate States.

After the Army finally put Custer out to pasture-over his vehement and profane objections-what had Dowling’s reward been? Eagles on his shoulders, eagles and the post of commandant of Salt Lake City. Trying to hold the Mormons down was even more fun than trying to hold Custer down had been. Dowling had been in General Pershing’s office when a sniper assassinated Pershing. No one had ever caught the murderer-the Mormons took care of their own. And after that, Utah was Abner Dowling’s baby.