Harry Turtledove: End of the Beginning

“It could have been worse,” Foster allowed. “I’ve seen cadets try to head for Miami or New Orleans or Atlanta. But it could have been a hell of a lot better, too. If you want carrier duty, you’d better keep hitting the books hard.”

“Yes, sir. I will, sir,” Joe said fervently. Carrier duty-the chance to hit back at Japan as soon as he could-was the reason he’d signed up as a Navy flying cadet in the first place.

Lieutenant Foster slid back the canopy. He and Joe climbed out of the Texan. The flying instructor was a lanky six-footer. He towered over Joe, who barely made five-seven. That might have mattered if they were bashing at each other with swords. Who cared how big a pilot was? Joe had heard Southerners say, It’s not the size of the dog in the fight-it’s the size of the fight in the dog. What the Japanese had done since December 7 proved the same thing, but Joe wasn’t inclined to give a bunch of goddamn Japs credit for anything.

He eyed the Texan with a mixture of exasperation and affection. It was a big step up from the sedate Stearman biplane on which he’d done his primary flight training. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a Yellow Peril buzzed by overhead. The Navy painted all its Stearmans a luminous yellow to warn other pilots that trainees were in the air.

Yes, the Texan was a long step up from a Yellow Peril. It was a monoplane with a real metal skin, not the doped canvas covering a Stearman. It had a machine gun in the left wing root-the one Joe had used to blast away at the target another plane towed. It had bomb racks, too. It could do a pretty good job of impersonating a warplane.

But it was only an impersonation. The Texan’s engine put out half the horsepower of a Wildcat’s. Its top speed was only about two-thirds of the Navy fighter’s. That that all made it much more forgiving than the genuine article was only a detail to Joe.

Groundcrew men came out to detach the plane’s tailhook from the wire and get it out of the way so another cadet could land on the yellow-outlined “carrier deck.” Lieutenant Foster said, “How soon do you think you’ll be ready to solo in a Texan?”

Joe blinked. He hadn’t expected that question from Foster, especially not after the instructor reamed out his navigation. But it had only one possible answer: “Sir, I’m ready to take a swing at it right this minute if you want me to.”

Foster had blond hair, a lock of which kept falling down on his forehead, and an aw-shucks smile that probably put the girls in mind of Gary Cooper. It put skinny, swarthy Joe Crosetti in mind of the Nob Hill nobs who looked down their straight noses at dagos like him. But the officer didn’t give him a hard time because of his last name or his looks. Foster said, “I approve of your spirit, Mr. Crosetti. The Navy needs more men who don’t hesitate. But if the flesh doesn’t quite measure up to it, you’re better off waiting, and the country would be better off if you did, too.” Joe must have looked stubborn, or maybe angry, because the flying instructor sighed and went on, “How many memorial services have you attended since you got here?”

“Uh, a few, sir,” Joe admitted. He’d been to more than a few, and he was sure Wiley Foster knew it. As soon as cadets started getting up into the air, they started finding ways to kill themselves. One midair collision between Yellow Perils had wiped out two cadets and two instructors. Cadets had crashed on the runway. They’d gone into the swamps around Pensacola Naval Air Station. A kid took a Stearman out over the Gulf of Mexico and never came back. No one ever found a trace of him-he was missing and presumed dead. All the same, Joe said, “That wouldn’t happen to me .” He had faith in his own indestructibility.

Lieutenant Foster clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That’s what they all say. Sometimes it’s the last thing they say.” He eyed Joe. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I can swing it,” Joe said stubbornly.

Foster looked down at the card on which he’d recorded Joe’s marks for the session. “Maybe you can, by God. Next time you go up, you’ll go up by yourself.”

“Thank you, sir!” Joe wanted to get all excited. He did get all excited, but he didn’t let most of it show. He was damned if he’d act Italian in front of somebody who looked the way Wiley Foster did.

He did head back to the barracks at the next thing to a dead run. When he first got to Pensacola, he and his roomie had shared a tent. Some cadets still slept under canvas-no enormous handicap in the steamy Pensacola summertime. But he and Orson Sharp had graduated to better things.

By the time he got to the two-story brick barracks building, he was drenched in sweat. San Francisco hadn’t come close to getting him ready for Florida heat and humidity. His father was a fisherman; he’d gone out of Fisherman’s Wharf with his old man on weekends and during summers before he landed the job at Scalzi’s garage. Till he got here, though, he’d never understood what a lobster went through when you dropped it in boiling water.

Heat and humidity or not, he took the stairs two at a time. He ran down the hall and threw the door open. Orson Sharp sat in a chair by his bunk, studying navigation. The cadet from Salt Lake City was big and fair and even-tempered. He didn’t swear and he didn’t drink coffee, let alone beer. Sharp was the first Mormon Joe had ever met. Joe sometimes thought he was too good to be true, though he never would have said so.

“How did it go?” Sharp asked, looking up from his book.

Joe’s enormous grin probably said everything he needed to say, but he spelled it out just the same:

“Lieutenant Foster’s going to let me solo next time I go up! I can’t wait!”

His roomie’s pleasure seemed entirely unalloyed. “That’s terrific! I know you were hoping, but I don’t think you expected it quite so soon.”

“Nope. He liked my firing run at the target. I think that’s what clinched it.” Slower than he should have, Joe remembered Sharp had flown this morning, too. “How about you?”

“My instructor let me take it up by myself today.” Sharp shrugged in wry self-deprecation. “I lived.”

Joe fought down a stab of jealousy. His roommate had soloed in a Stearman a week before he had, too. Sharp did everything well and didn’t fuss about anything. He was so unassuming, you almost had to act the same way around him. Joe walked over and stuck out his hand. “Way to go! Congratulations!”

“Thanks, buddy.” Orson Sharp’s hand was almost half again as big as his. When the cadets played football, Sharp was a lineman. Joe played end or defensive back. He was quick, but he wasn’t big.

“We’re getting there,” Sharp added.

“Yeah!” Joe said. “We’ve still got instrument flying to do, on the Link trainers on the ground and then up in the air, and I suppose they’ll give us some flight time on F3Fs, too.” The Navy’s last biplane fighter had stayed in front-line service till less than two months before Pearl Harbor. Joe tried to imagine F3Fs mixing it up with Zeros. Perhaps mercifully, the picture didn’t want to form. Now the F3F was a last-step trainer. Joe added two more words: “And then…”

“And then we see where they assign us,” Sharp said. “Did you put down VC on all three lines on your preference questionnaire way back when?”

“Carrier duty? You bet your… You bet I did.” Around his roomie, Joe didn’t swear very much, either.

“You?”

“Oh, sure,” Sharp answered. “If they don’t give me that, I don’t care what I get. Everything else is a booby prize.”

“I’m with you.” Joe didn’t give a damn about patrol planes or flying boats (no, that wasn’t true-he hated Jap flying boats, because one had dropped a bomb on the house where his uncle and aunts and cousins lived, but he didn’t give a damn about piloting an American flying boat) or anything but carrier-based air, preferably fighters.