Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

Christ! They wouldn’t even get to bury him. There probably wasn’t enough left to bury.

If we don’t kick the Nips’ yellow asses, none of this means shit. There was the war, in one profane sentence. But with Orson Sharp dead, another thought filled Joe’s mind. Even if they did kick the Nips’ yellow asses, did any of this mean shit?

KENZO TAKAHASHI APPROACHED THE BARRICADE with more than a little trepidation. Seeing a machine gun aimed at your belly button would do that. “Who are you?” demanded one of the men behind the gun. “Why should we let you by?” Like most of the soldiers from the special naval landing force, he was both meaner and jumpier than the Army men they’d supplanted in and around Honolulu.

After giving his name, Kenzo added, “I’m Jiro Takahashi’s son. Do you listen to him?”

And that did the trick, and not for the first time, either. The scowling soldier at the machine gun suddenly grinned-and all of a sudden he was a friendly kid, no older than Kenzo. “You’re the Fisherman’s son? You must be all right, then. Come ahead.” He even gave Kenzo a hand to help him scramble up over the barricade.

It made Kenzo want to laugh and cry at the same time. He wasn’t all right, not the way the soldier meant. He was rooting for the USA, not for Japan. He hated trading on his father’s celebrity among the occupiers. However much he hated it, he did it, because it worked. He felt as if he were getting away with passing counterfeit money every time.

On he went. The soldiers at the next barricade, seeing that he’d passed the one before, didn’t give him any trouble. That was a relief. Everybody in Honolulu, locals and occupiers alike, was nervous these days. With American planes in the air, with American troops ashore, plenty of people who’d sucked up to the Japanese were trying to figure out how to explain what they’d been up to since December 7, 1941.

The occupiers knew that perfectly well. They might be bastards, but they weren’t fools. They trusted next to nobody now, and often showed mistrust by opening fire. And the way they treated locals showed no signs of getting better-if anything, it was getting worse.

Kenzo talked his way past two more barricades before he made it to Elsie Sundberg’s neighborhood. No soldiers were on her street, which relieved him. Nobody else was out and about, either. That struck him as smart. This was the haole part of town, and the Japanese trusted whites even less than they trusted anybody else. Farther west, the occupiers had plastered up propaganda posters saying things like ASIANS TOGETHER AGAINST IMPERIALISM! in several languages. They didn’t bother here. The haoles lay low and hoped neglect wouldn’t turn to massacre.

Elsie opened the door even before Kenzo knocked. “Come in, honey,” she said. “Come in quick!” He did. She shut the door behind him. The Venetian blinds were closed; nobody could see in from the street.

“Are you okay?” she asked, giving him a hug.

“Me? Yeah, sure. I’m fine.” Kenzo didn’t say anything about running the machine-gun gauntlet on the way over here. He just clung to her.

“Hello, Ken.” Mrs. Sundberg came out from the kitchen. Before he’d got Elsie away from the soldiers in the park-and before what happened afterwards-her arrival would have made him let go of her daughter as if Elsie had become red-hot. Not now. He kept on holding her, and Mrs. Sundberg didn’t say boo. She just went on with the rituals of hospitality: “Would you like some lemonade?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” Kenzo said. She did make good lemonade. As she went back to the kitchen to get some, he asked Elsie, “You folks have enough to eat?”

She shrugged. “We’re all right. We’re not great, but we’re all right.” She was a lot skinnier than she had been when they went to school together. He was thinner, too, but not to the same degree; there were advantages to being a fisherman in hard times.

“How are things out in the city?” Mrs. Sundberg asked, returning with lemonade for Kenzo and for Elsie.

“We, ah, don’t get out much these days.”

“You’re smart not to,” Kenzo answered. “If you weren’t staying close to home, I sure would tell you to.” He talked about the barricades, and about how the occupation troops were getting antsier by the hour. “I think they’re liable to make a big fight right here in town, and to… heck with civilians. It looks that way, anyhow.”

“That’s not good,” Elsie said, which was a pretty fair understatement.

“Not even a little bit,” Kenzo agreed. “It’s one of the reasons I came over here-to ask if you people have any kind of hiding place you can duck into if things get really bad.” He didn’t go into detail about what really bad might mean, or how bad it might be. He had the idea he didn’t know in any detail himself, and that that might be just as well for his own peace of mind.

Elsie’s mother sniffed. “These houses aren’t like the one in Connecticut where I grew up. They don’t have a proper basement.” By the way she sounded, that might have been Kenzo’s fault.

By the way Elsie said, “Oh, Mom!” she must have thought the same thing.

“It’s true,” Mrs. Sundberg said. “And you know how much harder it made things when your father dug that hidey-hole under the walk-in closet during the… first round of unpleasantness.” She didn’t like talking-or thinking-about the Japanese invasion. Kenzo had seen that before. She would if she had to-she wasn’t far enough out in left field not to believe in it or anything-but she didn’t like it. It had turned her world upside down, and it meant she wasn’t on top of the world any more.

When the USA finished the job here, she would be again. How would she feel about Kenzo then?

That was a worry for another day. “Hidey-hole?” Kenzo echoed.

“See for yourself.” Mrs. Sundberg led him into the bedroom she shared with her husband. He’d never been in there before. The closet made him want to laugh, or to scream. All by itself, it seemed half the size of his family’s apartment. Why would anybody need all that stuff ?

The trap door in the floor, though, had to be of recent vintage. It lay under a throw rug, and was hard to spot in the gloom even with the rug off. Elsie’s mom made an oddly courteous gesture of invitation. Kenzo bent and lifted up the trap door. The hinges worked without a sound. The scent of damp earth rose from below into the closet.

As Mrs. Sundberg said, the house had no basement, only a crawl space. Her husband had dug out a hole under the trap door, and had heaped the dirt he’d dug out around it to help protect it from gunfire and shell fragments. It wouldn’t do much if a bomb fell on the house. For anything short of that…

“Wow!” Kenzo said, lowering the trap again. “That’s swell!”

Mrs. Sundberg neatly replaced the rug. “Ralph was in France in 1918,” she said. “He knows something about entrenching.”

“He never talks about what he did in the war,” Elsie said. From the times Kenzo had met him, Mr. Sundberg rarely talked about anything. He made money for the family; his wife and daughter did the talking. They all seemed content with the arrangement. Elsie went on, “This was the first time he ever did anything that showed he really had been in the fighting.”

What horrors had her father seen Over There? What had he done? He probably had reasons to keep quiet. Having got a glimpse of what war looked like when the Japanese pounded Honolulu, a glimpse and a pounding that cost him his mother, Kenzo had some idea how lucky he was not to know more. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than antiaircraft guns started hammering much too close by.