Harry Turtledove - Return engagement

A few would-be sailors nodded.

"You see what I mean?" Isbell growled.

"Yes, Chief!" the men chorused.

Isbell nodded. "That's more like it. I spend my breath talking to you puppies, I want to know you're paying attention. I don't like wasting my time, you know what I mean?" He paused and lit a cigarette. After his first drag, he made a face. "Damn thing tastes like horseshit." That didn't stop him from smoking it down to a tiny butt as he continued, "Other thing you gotta remember is, ammo's cheap. Ships are a lot more expensive." He looked the trainees up and down. "You guys might be worth a little somethin', too, but I wouldn't count on it a whole hell of a lot."

So there, George thought. An old-fashioned two-decker flew back and forth, towing a cloth target at the end of a long line. No matter how long the line was, one eager-beaver group almost shot down the target tug instead of the target. The Bald Eagle waxed eloquent on the shortcomings of the material the Navy had to use these days. That, in its way, was also rather like walking into an unexpected volley of 40mm ammunition.

George's group did better. He wasn't sure they hit the target, but they did scare it. "I've seen worse," Isbell declared. From him, that was high praise.

After the session, George went up to the chief and said, "My father used to serve a one-pounder on a destroyer in the last war."

"Those goddamn things." Isbell spoke with a mixture of affection and exasperation that George understood from training on such a gun. "You had to be lucky to hit an airplane with 'em, but you sure could make a sub say uncle if you caught it on the surface. What ship, kid?"

George was past thirty. Nobody'd called him kid for quite a while. If anyone had the right, though, it was somebody like the Bald Eagle. "He was on the Ericsson," he answered.

Isbell's face changed. Every Navy veteran knew about the Ericsson. "At the end?" he asked. George nodded. To his amazement, the Bald Eagle set a hand on his shoulder. "That's rough, kid. I'm sorry as hell." All at once, the chief's gaze sharpened. "Wait a minute. You're Enos. Are you related to the Enos gal who…?"

"Who shot the Confederate submersible skipper? That was my mother," George said proudly.

"Fuck me." Isbell made the obscenity sound like a much more sincere compliment than the one he'd given the gun crew. "You want antiaircraft duty, kid? You been making noises like you do. I bet you can have it. Personnel ain't gonna say no, not to somebody with your last name."

"I've… thought about that," George said. "I don't want to get anything just on account of who my mother and father were."

"You've got an angle. You've got an in. You'd have to be nuts not to use 'em," Isbell said. "Life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

George had heard plenty of advice he liked less. He said, "Is there any way I can get to sea faster than usual?"

But Isbell just laughed at that, laughed and shook his head. "Nope. Sorry, Enos, but that ain't gonna happen. You gotta know what you gotta know, and the Navy's gotta know you know what you gotta know. Nothing personal-don't get me wrong-but if they put you on a ship before that, you're liable to be more of a menace than a help, if you know what I mean."

With a tight, sour smile, George changed the subject. He did know what the Bald Eagle meant, and wished he didn't. A couple of times, he'd gone on a fishing run with men who didn't know what the hell they were doing, men who were trying the fisherman's life for the first time. Even when they were eager to work, they might as well have been so many kittens. They got in everybody's way and caused more trouble than they were worth.

And then he realized that, once upon a time, he'd been one of those kittens himself. How had the old-timers put up with him when he first started going out to fish? He'd been sixteen, seventeen, something like that: somebody the phrase green as paint was made for. The other guys had probably remembered what they were like when they first put to sea. That was the only explanation that made any sense to him. If he saw any of them again, he'd have to buy them a beer and thank them for their patience.

He worked hard on antiaircraft gunnery. He got practice firing bigger guns, too, as he had on the Lamson. The men in training didn't get to handle full-sized big-gun ammunition. The guns had subcaliber practice rounds, which couldn't do as much harm if something went wrong and which, as the CPO in charge of those guns (a near twin to Bald Eagle Isbell, except that he had a full head of graying hair) pointed out, were a hell of a lot cheaper than the real thing.

And he tried to learn the other things the Navy threw at him. Like anybody who'd made more than a few fishing runs, he was a pretty fair amateur mechanic. He'd fiddled with the Sweet Sue's diesel several times, and made things better more often than he'd made them worse. He'd learned on the Lamson, though, that, just as sailing on a fishing boat wasn't enough to let him go to sea right away on a warship, so fiddling with a diesel didn't teach him what he needed to know about the care and feeding of a steam turbine.

Some guys bitched about the classwork. Morris Fishbein asked the overage lieutenant who was teaching them, "Why do we need to know this, sir? Most of us aren't going into the black gang."

"I know that, Fishbein," the officer answered. "But if your ship takes a bomb or a shell or a torpedo and they have casualties down there, the men left alive will be screaming for help as loud as they can. And when they get it, they won't want a bunch of thumb-fingered idiots who don't know their ass from the end zone. They'll want people who can actually do them some good. Not all of you will be gunners, either, but you're learning to handle guns. Well, a ship's engine is just as much a weapon as her guns are."

The answer made more than enough sense to keep George happy. And the Navy knew how to ram home what people needed to learn. He wished his high-school teachers had been half as good. He might have stayed in long enough to graduate.

By the time he had both the training and the hands-on work on the Lamson, he thought he could have built an engine from scratch. He was wrong, of course, but a little extra confidence never hurt anybody.

Men applied for specialist schools: those who really would go into the black gang, men who'd handle the wireless and Y-ranging gear, cooks. There was a gunnery school, too. George put in for it. He let Bald Eagle Isbell know he had.

"Way to go, kid," the CPO said. "Tell you what I'll do. I'll bend a few people's ears. I know the right ones to talk to. I'd goddamn well better by now, eh? I've been at this business long enough."

"Thanks very much, Chief," George said.

"You're welcome," Isbell answered matter-of-factly. "I wouldn't do it if I didn't think you had the makings. That wouldn't be fair to whoever you shipped with. But you can do the job, so why the hell not?"

Lists of those assigned to this, that, or the other school appeared on the door outside the camp's administrative offices. George scanned them eagerly. His name wasn't on the one for the gunnery school, but it wasn't on any of the other lists, either. He wondered if the Navy really wanted him for anything at all.

And then, after a week of what felt like the worst anticlimax in the world, he found his name. Actually, Morrie Fishbein, who was standing beside him to check the lists, found it for him. Fishbein gave him a nudge with an elbow and said, "Hey, George, here you are."

"What? Where? Lemme see," George said. Fishbein pointed. George looked. "Gunnery school! Yeah!" He pumped his fist in the air. Then he remembered the other man. "What about you, Morrie? You anywhere?"

"Doesn't look like it." Fishbein sounded mournful. "I don't think anybody gives a damn about me." George hadn't been the only one with such worries, then.