Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

That flummoxed Dillon. In all his years in the Corps, he didn’t think he’d ever heard the like. “It’s not supposed to be fun, goddammit,” he said after that momentary amazement. “This isn’t a picnic. It isn’t a lark. Those Nip assholes are gonna fuckin’ kill you if they get half a chance. They’re good at it. That means we gotta be even better. You hear me, maggot?”

“Yes, Sergeant!” the boot bellowed. You hear me? had to be answered at top volume, lest worse befall. Worse would bloody well befall here any which way. “Drop down and give me fifty pushups,” Dillon growled. “Fun, my ass!”

“Yes, Sergeant!” the boot shouted again. He was a big, blond, wide-faced kid named Kowalski. Fifty pushups in the rain, in the mud, with a heavy pack on his back, were no joke. He was filthy and damn near dead by the time he finished them. Dillon wasn’t sure he could have done them himself. Kowalski, though, plainly would sooner have died for real than failed. That was a Marine’s way of thinking, too. He bounced to his feet after the last one, panting and scarlet but ready to go on with the march.

“Still having fun?” Dillon asked him.

By his expression, the kid wanted to say yes. But he wasn’t-quite-that dumb. “No, Sergeant!” he said loudly.

“Okay,” Dillon said. “Get it in gear.”

After a hot shower and a clean uniform, he told the story that evening over a beer in the NCOs’ club. Dutch Wenzel shook his head as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “Fun?” he said. “What the fuck is the world coming to?”

“Beats me,” Dillon answered. “How much fun will he think it is when his pal gets shot in the guts? How much fun will he think it is when he does? It’s a job, for Chrissake. We gotta do it, and we gotta do it right, but fun ? For crying out loud, Dutch!”

“Easy, man-easy.” Wenzel raised a placating hand. “You’re preaching to the choir here.”

“Okay, okay. It rocked me, though, I tell you.” Les shook his head, too. He still couldn’t get over it.

“Fun!”

“Don’t blame you,” Dutch said. “Even for a boot, that’s pushing it. Hey-I heard something pretty good, though.”

“Tell me,” Dillon urged. “Maybe it’ll help me get the taste of this out of my mouth.”

“I hear we launched a new carrier,” Dutch told him. “Gotta start making up for what the Japs nailed last summer.”

Les nodded. “That’s a fact-and you’re right; that is good news. What are they calling this one?”

“Essex,” Wenzel answered. “There are supposed to be more in the pipeline, too.”

“There’d better be,” Dillon said. “You gotta figure we’re going to lose some on the way in. We need to smash whatever they’ve got and have enough left over to handle their land-based air. If we don’t, we shouldn’t even start.”

“Yeah, well, you know that, and I know that, but do they know it back in Washington?” Wenzel said.

“Beats me,” Dillon said. “I’ll tell you one thing, though-we’re gonna find out.”

JANE ARMITAGE FOUND IT HARD to believe 1943 was more than a month old. Christmas and New Year’s had passed quietly. What was there to celebrate? And one day, one month, here was a lot like another. Oh, it was a little warmer in the summer, a little rainier in the winter, but, both times, only a little. She remembered Ohio. You didn’t have any trouble telling summer from winter in Columbus. In Wahiawa, you could lose track without a calendar.

Flowers bloomed. Butterflies danced and bees buzzed. Snow? When the school was open, she’d had to teach special lessons about snow. The third-graders couldn’t have understood half the Christmas carols if she hadn’t.

Downtown Wahiawa, such as it was, had suffered since the Japanese took over. All the stores that sold new clothes, new dishes, new furniture-new anything, when you got right down to it-had gone belly-up. New stuff had come from the mainland, and nothing came to Hawaii from the mainland any more except the occasional airplane full of bombs. Much as Jane approved of those, she didn’t want to buy one and take it back to the apartment.

Secondhand places, now… Those flourished. If you wanted a toaster or a dress or something to read, you got it secondhand. Used goods, if not abundant, were at least available. Jane sometimes felt like a ghoul when she sorted through them, for a lot of them came from the households of people who’d died in the fighting. But what could you do? Those luckless souls had no further use for their goods, and the people who were still alive desperately needed them.

When Jane saw a copy of Murder Must Advertise in the secondhand-book shop, she had all she could do not to jump for joy. She liked mysteries in general and Dorothy Sayers in particular, and she’d never read that one. Showing eagerness, though, would have run up the price. Nothing was fixed these days; everything depended on how much the seller thought he-or, in this case, she-thought the buyer would part with.

Jane picked up a cookbook she didn’t particularly want. Cookbooks made good cover; everyone was obsessed with food these days. She poked around through the store before casually adding the mystery to the cookbook. “How much for these two, Louise?” she asked.

Louise’s jaw worked. She might have been chewing gum, except there was no gum to chew. “Fifteen dollars,” she said after making whatever arcane calculations she made. Those calculations worked. She wasn’t as skinny as most people in Wahiawa.

“Fifteen?” Jane squeaked. “That’s outrageous!” And it was. She hadn’t expected Louise to say more than ten.

The bookstore owner shrugged. She chewed on the gum that wasn’t there. “Twelve, then,” she said reluctantly, “and you won’t jew me down another dime.”

“I’m not made out of money,” Jane protested. Louise shrugged again. Jane asked, “How much for each of them?” That boiled down to, how well had she hidden her reaction when she saw Murder Must Advertise ? If Louise thought she was mostly after the cookbook, she won. If the other woman knew she wanted the mystery, she didn’t.

Still more jaw-working followed. Louise was calculating what the traffic would bear. “Eight for this one, four for the other,” she said at last.

She wanted more for the cookbook. Jane didn’t cheer, even if she felt like it. Instead, she looked disappointed. “That’s too much,” she said, sending a longing glance toward the book full of recipes for Chinese chicken wings and Polynesian pork chops and bananas on the half shell and fish with pineapple sauce and suffering bastards.

“Take it or leave it.” Louise had the business manners of a snapping turtle.

Sighing, Jane put the cookbook back on the table where she’d found it. “I guess I can afford this one,” she said, tapping the mystery. “I sure wish you’d done it the other way, though.”

Louise looked smug. Jane gave her a five-dollar bill and got back two halves in change. She left the store in a hurry, before Louise figured out she was really ready to jump for joy.

The Japs had confiscated radios. A bomb had fallen on the local movie house. Making time go by was one of the hardest things you could do these days. A good book would kill several hours. If it was good enough, you could read it more than once, too. Jane could hardly wait to get back to her place, open up the novel, and be transported from Oahu to a larger, cooler, foggier isle.

But she hadn’t slipped the surly bonds of reality yet. Up the street came a work gang of American POWs herded along by Japanese guards with bayoneted rifles. She eyed them with horrified fascination. As always, they reminded her how things could have been worse.