Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Can’t tell you for sure,” Peterson said grimly, “but that’s how it looks to me, too.” He looked around. “You probably don’t want to talk about it a whole hell of a lot. You don’t want to say that name, either. Otherwise, the Japs may decide to find out how much you know about it.”

“Well, shit,” McKinley said again, in a different tone of voice. He looked around, as if expecting a guard to be listening over his shoulder. Peterson would have worried even more about other POWs. Knowing who could be trusted wasn’t always easy. McKinley nodded, at least half to himself. “Gotcha.”

“Attaboy, Prez.”

The chow line crawled forward. As usual, there wasn’t enough to eat and it was lousy. Also as usual, everybody emptied-indeed, polished-his mess kit. The only thing worse than not enough food was no food at all. Camp rations came altogether too close to that, but they weren’t quite there.

Fighters on patrol buzzed overhead. The Japs were bound to be taking that much more seriously since the American raid. Peterson glanced up at the warplanes, then all at once eyed them seriously. “Goddamn!” he exclaimed.

“Now what?” Prez McKinley asked.

Peterson pointed to the fighters. “Those aren’t Zeros.” He spoke with complete authority. He’d earned the right, by God, not just through study but because a Zero had knocked his Wildcat out of the sky. “They’ve got to be planes from the Japanese Army instead.”

“Yeah? And so?” Prez didn’t see the point. He was shrewd, no doubt about that, but he really did have a noncom’s narrow view of the world. He was also an infantryman. What happened in the air and on the water didn’t mean so much to him.

Peterson spelled things out: “No way in hell those could’ve flown here all by themselves. Stinking slanty-eyed bastards had to ship ’em in. This place is like a great big old aircraft carrier right out in the middle of the Pacific, and the Japs are sure as hell making the most of it.”

“They’ll ship in planes. They’ll ship in gas and ammo for ’em. They’ll ship in enough chow for their own guys.” McKinley pointed to one of the guards. Sure enough, the man hadn’t missed any meals. “What does everybody else get? Hind tit, that’s what.”

“Yeah.” Peterson wondered how much more weight he could drop and still keep going. He didn’t know, but he had little doubt he’d find out.

BY NOW, OSCAR van der Kirk got more envious comments than astonished ones when he assembled his sailboard on Waikiki Beach. He wasn’t the only one who’d made the conversion any more; several others, Charlie Kaapu among them, had imitated him. He didn’t mind. There seemed to be enough fish to go around. Some of the others were using the boards more for sport than for fishing. He’d seen people do some pretty spectacular things. The more he watched them, the more he felt like doing spectacular things himself. He’d already tried one the first day he came in, but they were outdoing him now.

Beside Oscar, Charlie planted his newly converted sailboard’s mast in its socket. “You were one sly haole to come up with this scheme,” Charlie said admiringly. “I didn’t think it would work when you started talking about it, but I was wrong.”

Oscar shrugged. “What’s being a haole got to do with it? Hawaiians were the ones who started this whole surf-riding business in the first place.”

“That was a long time ago,” Charlie said, which seemed to make sense to him even if it didn’t make a whole lot to Oscar. He added, “We were okay as long as we were just in the game against us, you know what I mean? But then haoles came along, and you knew how to do all this stuff we couldn’t, and so we pretty much stopped trying to figure out new stuff on our own.”

Was that why Hawaiians and hapa — Hawaiians were the way they were? Oscar had no idea. A lot of them just seemed to drift without trying to make much of their lives, though.

Since Oscar had spent most of the time since coming to Hawaii drifting through life, he couldn’t very well blame them. He made sure his mast was firmly seated, then said, “Let’s go on out.”

Fishermen stepped aside to let them go into the surf. Oscar wondered if there was any beach on Oahu that didn’t have its complement of fishermen these days. Unless he missed his guess, there wasn’t. Fishing wasn’t just a sport any more. It was a vital part of feeding the island, just like the gardens that had sprung up everywhere. If you didn’t have access to fish or to garden vegetables, what did you get? Rice, and not very much of it.

Into the water he slid. As usual, the Pacific was not too hot, not too cold. “Just right,” he murmured. Not for the first time, he thought of Goldilocks and the three bears.

He and Charlie paddled out to sea, guiding their surfboards over the waves till they could stand up and unfurl their sails instead. “This is really something, you smart son of a bitch,” Charlie called. “You could make sailboards for everybody in the world, make yourself a million dollars.”

He might even have been right-had Oscar had the idea at another time. As things were… “There’s this little thing called the war.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember that.” By the way Charlie said it, he hadn’t remembered till Oscar reminded him. Oscar laughed, wishing that could be true. He would never be able to forget those horrible moments off Waimea, stuck in the crossfire between the Japanese invasion force and the American defenders on the shore. He’d never forget pissing himself in terror, either.

Not even Charlie Kaapu knew about that. A sudden thought occurred to Oscar. He glanced over at his friend. Could Charlie have done the same thing? Maybe wondering about it was just misery loving company-but if Charlie hadn’t been scared to death out there, too, he wasn’t human.

I’ll never know for sure, Oscar thought. I can’t ask him. And if he did, he can’t ask me, either. Just one of those things.

Charlie took to sailboarding as if it were his idea and not Oscar’s. That was no great surprise; any surf-rider could adapt to the addition of the sail pretty fast. But Charlie also seemed to enjoy skimming along over the waves under wind power as if he’d thought of it. Of course, Charlie enjoyed everything he did. If he didn’t enjoy it, he didn’t do it.

“You ever see that blond wahine any more after she move out?” he asked.

“Susie? Nope, not lately.” Oscar shook his head and shrugged. “She was fun in bed, but she was kind of rugged any other way.”

“Yeah, well, dames are like that sometimes.” Charlie took everything in stride. “Enjoy ’em while you can, then kiss ’em good-bye.” He’d kissed a lot of women good-bye. So had Oscar, but Charlie never let it bother him. “No huhu,” he said now. It might have been his motto.

Oscar looked back over his shoulder. Oahu receded behind him-much faster than it would have before he’d had his surfboard altered. “We ought to split up,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t love you”-Charlie boomed laughter and blew him a kiss-“but we both ought to bring in as many fish as we can.”

“Oh, yeah.” Charlie didn’t argue about that. Hunger was something even he took seriously. “See you later, alligator.” He slanted off toward the west, as slick as Vaseline on the sailboard.

Am I that good? Oscar wondered. He shrugged again. He probably wasn’t quite that stylish, but he got the job done even so. He swung a little toward the east, to put as much room between himself and Charlie Kaapu as he could.

He had a pretty good day fishing-not a great day, but a pretty good one. He got plenty of fish for himself, some for Eizo Doi, and some to sell. The Japs hadn’t got around to regulating sailboarders the way they did with the men who fished from sampans. He could take what he didn’t give to the handyman and sell it in one of the unofficial markets. A little cash was always nice. Food that wasn’t fish or rigidly rationed rice was even nicer.