Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

Charlie Kaapu did the same thing, so Oscar didn’t feel too bad. Charlie was more reckless than he was. They ate fish and clams on the beach. Charlie-reckless again-pried some sea urchins off the nearby rocks, too. He cracked them with a stone to get at the orange flesh inside. “Japs eat this stuff,” he said. Oscar never had, but he was hungry enough not to be fussy. The meat proved better than he expected. It wasn’t like anything he’d tasted before; the iodine tang reminded him of the sea. “What we ought to do is see if we can get some of those plovers”-he pointed to the shorebirds walking along the beach-“and cook them.”

“I wish they were doves instead,” Charlie said. “Doves are too dumb for anybody to miss ’em.”

The plovers weren’t. They flew off before Oscar and Charlie could get close enough to throw rocks at them. “Oh, well,” Oscar said. “Worth a try.”

He and Charlie got to Waimea Bay the next day. Again, they took down their rigging before going ashore the first time. Oscar looked back over his shoulder as he rode toward the beach. No Jap invasion fleet this time. No Americans with machine guns in the jungle back of the beach, either.

Once up on the golden sand, they left their masts and sails there. As they went back into the Pacific, they solemnly shook hands. “Made it,” Charlie said. Oscar nodded.

And then they paddled out again. The waves weren’t the three-story-building monsters they were when the north shore was at its finest. They were one-and-a-half- or two-story monsters-suitable for all ordinary purposes and quite a few extraordinary ones. Skimming along at the curl of the wave, or under the curl in a roaring tube of green and white, was as much fun as you could have out of bed, and not so far removed in its growing excitement and intensity from the fun you had in bed.

“This is why we’re here,” Charlie said after one amazing run. Oscar didn’t know whether he meant this was why they’d come to the north shore or why they’d been born. Either way, he wasn’t inclined to quarrel.

Part of the excitement was knowing what happened when things went wrong. Oscar was catfooted on his surfboard-but even cats slip once in a while. Then they try to pretend they haven’t done it. Oscar didn’t have that chance. He went one way, the surf board went another, and the wave rolled over him. He had time for one startled yip before he had to fight to keep from drowning.

It was like getting stuck in God’s cement mixer. For a few seconds, he literally didn’t know which end was up. He got slammed into the seabottom, hard enough to scrape hide off his flank. It could have been his face; he’d done that before, too. The roaring and churning dinned in his ears-dinned all through him. He struggled toward the surface. The ocean didn’t want to let him up.

His lungs hadn’t quite reached the bursting point when he managed to grab a breath, but they weren’t far away, either. Then another mountain of water fell on him. No half-drowned pup was ever more draggled than he was when he staggered up onto blessedly dry land.

Charlie Kaapu was trotting down the beach to capture his truant surfboard. “Some wipeout, buddy,” Charlie called. “You crashed and burned.”

“Tell me about it,” Oscar said feelingly. He looked down at himself. “Man, I’m chewed up.”

“Wanna quit?” Charlie asked.

Oscar shook his head. “You nuts? This is part of what we came for, too. Thanks for snagging my board.”

“Any time,” Charlie said. “Not like you haven’t done it for me. Not like maybe you won’t very next wave.” He came up and slapped Oscar on the back, being careful to pick an unabraded spot. “You’re okay, ace. You’re a number-one surf-rider.”

“Waste time,” Oscar said, trying to disguise how proud he was. “Let’s go.”

The Pacific stung his hide when he went out again, as if to remind him what it could do. He didn’t care. He was doing what he wanted to do-Charlie was right about that. They rode the waves till they got too hungry to stand it, then went into Waimea. The little siamin place where they’d eaten on December 7 was still open. The local Jap who ran it spoke no more English than he had then. The soup had changed a bit. The noodles were rice noodles now, and the siamin was loaded with fish instead of pork. It was still hot and filling and cheap and good.

Once they’d eaten, they went back out to the ocean. They rode the surf till sundown, then went back for more siamin. Three days passed like that. Then, not without regret, Oscar said, “I better head back.”

He waited for Charlie to tell him how pussy-whipped he was. But his friend just pointed west and said, “Let’s sail all the way around. We can ride the surf other places, too.”

“Deal,” Oscar said gratefully. Not only was it a deal-it sounded like fun. And he hadn’t looked forward to beating his way back along the windward coast, anyhow.

Kaena Point, in the far west, had been the only part of Oahu where roads didn’t reach, though the island’s narrow-gauge railroad did round the point. As Oscar and Charlie sailboarded by, they watched POWs slowly and laboriously building a highway there. “Poor bastards,” Charlie said. Oscar nodded. They were doing it all with hand tools. That had to be killing labor.

Oscar wasn’t sorry to leave the prisoners behind. They reminded him how bad things really were in Hawaii these days. Being able to catch his own food, being out on the ocean so much, had shielded him from the worst of it. So had having a girlfriend at least as self-reliant as he was.

He and Charlie had made it down the coast almost as far as Waianae when they got another reminder of the war-this one, to Oscar’s surprise, by sea instead of by land. A convoy of several nondescript, even ugly, Marus shepherded along by two destroyers chugged past them well out in the Pacific, plainly bound for Honolulu.

Those dumpy freighters might have been carrying anything: rice, ammunition, spare parts, gasoline. For all Oscar knew, they might have been crowded with soldiers. They were too far away for him to tell. He watched them for a while. So did Charlie. Neither said anything. What could you say? Those ships showed how times had changed.

And then times changed again. One of the freighters blew up-a deep, flat crump! that carried across the water. A great cloud of black smoke sprang up from the stricken Maru. Perhaps half a minute later, another ship got hit. Smoke also rose from that one, though not so much.

“Did you see that?” “Holy Jesus!” “There’s a sub out there-there must be!” “Eeeyow!” Oscar and Charlie were both making excited noises so fast, Oscar didn’t know which of them was saying what. The Japanese destroyers went nuts. They had been sheep dogs. Now they were wolves, on the prowl for a snake in-or rather, under-the grass. They darted this way and that. One of them fired a gun-at nothing that Oscar could see.

Both torpedoed freighters settled in the water, one quickly, the other more sedately. Planes with meatballs on the wings and fuselage buzzed off Oahu and around the convoy, also searching for the American submarine. They had no better luck than the warships did.

“That freighter’s still burning,” Oscar said after a while.

“Oil or gas,” Charlie said. “Oil, I bet-gas and it would really have gone sky-high. That’s no skin off my nose. The Japs would’ve kept it all themselves anyway.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Nice to see the United States hasn’t given up. I mean, we know that, but it’s nice to see. ”

Charlie nodded. “I want to see ’em blow King Stanley”-he laced the title with contempt-“out of one of his own guns. Serve him right.”