Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

He hadn’t needed long to decide Orson Sharp was a strange breed of cat. Trainees bound for Chapel Hill filled the car. Blue language filled the air. Most guys, among themselves, used profanity for emphasis, almost for punctuation. Joe did, and he’d never thought of himself as particularly foulmouthed. But as far as he could tell, Sharp didn’t swear at all.

He didn’t drink coffee, either. When they went to the dining car, Joe guzzled the stuff. “Gotta get my heart started some kind of way,” he said.

He wondered if Sharp would give him an argument, the way temperance people did if you had anything good to say about the demon rum. But the would-be flier from Salt Lake just nodded and said, “Whatever you think is right for yourself.”

“How come you don’t think it’s right for you?” Joe asked, quickly adding, “Don’t answer if you think I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.” He didn’t want to get Sharp mad. Strange breed of cat or not, he seemed a pretty good guy.

And he smiled now. “That’s okay. I don’t mind. My religion teaches that we shouldn’t smoke or drink alcohol or coffee or tea.”

“Your religion?” Joe scratched his head. He knew some Jews, and knew they didn’t eat pork or, if they were strict enough, shrimp or lobsters or clams, either. But they drank-and they drank coffee, too. And they smoked. Then, probably slower than it should have, a light went on in his head. “You’re one of those Mormons, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.” Orson Sharp laughed. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?”

“Probably-San Francisco’s a big city. But not that I ever knew of.” Joe gave Sharp a curious look. Did he have three wives back home? Did his father have three wives, or thirty-three? That was what you heard about Mormons.

He suddenly realized Sharp knew just what he was thinking. “Well?” the other young man said. “No fangs, no horns, no tail.”

Joe’s ears got hot. He suspected he turned red. To keep from showing it, he raised his coffee cup to his lips. Then he lowered it. Even something as ordinary as drinking coffee all at once felt funny. “Heck with it,” he said. “I’m a Catholic. There’s people who don’t like us, either. But we’re all Americans first, right?”

Instead of coffee, Orson Sharp had a glass of apple juice by his plate of bacon and eggs and hash browns. He lifted it as if making a toast. “We’re all Americans first. That’s just right. And we’re not America First, either.”

“Damn straight!” Joe exclaimed. “Those damn fools helped the Japs catch us with our pants down in Hawaii. You listen to them, nothing could ever happen to us, so we didn’t have to worry about the war. Shows how much they knew, doesn’t it?”

“Most of them have wised up since then,” Sharp said, and Joe nodded. Pearl Harbor and the invasion had knocked the bottom out of isolationism. Just about everyone who’d believed in it had come to his senses since. The handful who hadn’t were crackpots and chowderheads and pro-fascists: nobody worth paying any attention to.

“Listen,” Joe said. “If we get a chance to pick roomies when we get where we’re going, you want to stick together?”

“Sure,” Sharp said. “Why not?” He stuck out his hand. In the clasp, it almost swallowed up Joe’s.

Young Navy officers-ensigns and lieutenants, junior grade-met the train at the Durham station. They divided the newly arrived flying cadets into groups of fifty or so. The ensign in charge of Joe’s group was a tall, green-eyed fellow named Don Ward. “I am your mother,” he announced in an accent not far removed from where they were. Several people snickered. Ward waited till they were through, then repeated himself: “I am your mother. That’s what they call my duty. I am supposed to shepherd you all through this here training course, and I aim to do it. I am also supposed to keep you out of mischief, and I aim to do that, too.”

He got his charges aboard a bus that barely held them and their luggage. With much grinding of gears, the bus chugged toward Chapel Hill, about twelve miles away. The town proved tiny, the business block hardly more than a block long. Homes seemed pleasant enough, often separated from one another by ivy-covered walls. Except for the cedars, all the trees that would have given shade in the summertime were naked now. Without their leaves on them, Joe couldn’t tell one kind from another.

The University of North Carolina dominated Chapel Hill. The bus wheezed to a stop in front of a three-story brick building. A native Californian, Joe didn’t like brick buildings; they fell down in earthquakes. He laughed at himself, wondering when North Carolina had last had an earthquake. That would be okay.

“This is Old East,” Ensign Ward told his charges. “It’s almost a hundred and fifty years old-the oldest state college building in the country.”

Maybe he thought people would be impressed to hear that. Joe was impressed, all right, but probably not the way Dillon had in mind. Wonderful, he thought. They’re sticking us in a goddamn ruin.

“Old East will be your home while you’re here. You will be four to a room.” Ward waited out the groans, then went on, “This is not the worst introduction to Navy life. If you can’t get the hang of living in each other’s pockets, you probably don’t belong here. Ships are crowded places. You need to get used to the idea. If you’ve already started pairing off, that’s okay. We’ll try to accommodate you.”

Joe caught Orson Sharp’s eye. The cadet from Utah nodded. In a voiceless whisper, Joe asked, “Got anybody else in mind?”

Sharp shook his head. “Not yet. How about you?” he answered, just as quietly.

“Nope,” Joe said. “Want to trust to luck? Or do you see anybody you especially want to snag?”

“Luck will do,” Sharp said. “This looks like a pretty good bunch of guys. How can we go wrong?” He and Joe were about the same age, but Joe felt ten years older. Somehow, the cadet from Utah had missed out on his share of cynicism. How can we go wrong? Joe thought. Just wait and see. You’ll find out how we can. But Orson Sharp expected things to go right, not wrong. Joe didn’t know whether to call him a Pollyanna or to envy him his confidence.

They got joined up with Bill Frank, who was from Oakland, and Otis Davis, who’d got on the train in St. Louis. Frank and Davis seemed to be a pair, too. That made Joe feel a little better-at least they weren’t guys nobody else wanted anything to do with.

The room… wasn’t as bad as Joe had expected. That was about as much as he could say for it. It wasn’t big enough to swing a cat, but he hadn’t looked for anything different there. The iron-framed bunk beds also came as no surprise. It did boast electricity and running water, even if you could tell they were add-ons. The people who’d built the room hadn’t thought there would ever be such things.

Whoever built the room hadn’t thought there would ever be such things as human beings in it, either. That was how it seemed to Joe, anyhow. The window was tiny and set high in the wall, so it let in only a little light and gave a lousy view. And the place had a peculiar kind of airlessness to it. It felt stuffy with the door open and got downright stifling with the door closed.

Otis Davis said, “I’m glad we’ll be out of there before the hot weather comes. This place’d be a bake oven like you wouldn’t believe.”

“ Gevalt! ” Bill Frank said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Only goes to show you’re from the West Coast,” Davis said. “If you came from a place where it gets hot and muggy, you’d know the signs.”

“This is a pretty crazy town, not even big enough for a train station,” Joe said.