End of the Beginning

by Harry Turtledove

  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.

  “Look, if there’s any sign of trouble, you use that hole, you hear?” he said. “Don’t wait. It’s . . . pretty bad.”

  “We will.” Elsie and her mother spoke at the same time.

  “Okay. I better go, then. That’s what I wanted to make sure about.” What he really wanted was to take Elsie back to her bedroom and close the door. He couldn’t say that or do anything about it, not with Mrs. Sundberg standing right there. He just dipped his head awkwardly. “Be careful.”

  Elsie wasn’t as shy as he was. She hugged him and gave him a kiss that made him want to take her back there more than ever. And she whispered in his ear: “My time of the month came, so that’s okay.”

  “Good,” he whispered back. Worrying about a girlfriend was hard enough. Worrying about a girlfriend who was expecting would have been twice as bad, or maybe four times. After a moment, Kenzo kissed Elsie. Mrs. Sundberg was still standing right there, and she didn’t say a word.

  MAJOR GENERAL YAMASHITA HAD MOVED HIS HEADQUARTERS out of Iolani Palace and over to Pearl City. Minoru Genda wished the commanding general hadn’t. For one thing, it gave him fewer excuses to visit Queen Cynthia. For another, it put the defense of Honolulu in the hands of Captain Iwabuchi and the special naval landing forces. Iwabuchi was a samurai of the old go-down-fighting school. He could not have cared less if he took all the civilians and the whole city down with him.

  “We still have a lot of sailors at Pearl Harbor,” Genda said. “The Americans put men like that in the line against us. If you want to do the same, sir, they are ready and willing to fight alongside your soldiers.”

  “They’ll probably have to.” Yamashita’s voice was gloomy. “The American soldiers who tried fighting as infantry got slaughtered. The same will likely happen to our men.” He glowered at the map spread out on a table in front of him. Blue-headed pins and pencil marks showed the American advance between the Waianae and Koolau Ranges. Despite desperate Japanese counterattacks, U.S. forces ground forward day by day. Yamashita went on, “We don’t really need sailors fighting on land. We need carriers and planes.”

  “Yes, sir.” Genda knew too well that all the carriers Japan had left, put together, couldn’t launch half as many planes as the U.S. armada off the north coast of Oahu. He also knew that the planes the Japanese could launch were nowhere near a match for their American opponents. “We have requested reinforcements,” he said. “So far, Tokyo has not seen fit to send them out.”

  Admiral Yamamoto was too smart to waste resources like that. Genda hoped he was, anyhow. There would be other battles to fight later, battles where Japan wouldn’t be at such an overwhelming disadvantage. The soldiers and sailors already here could go right on delaying U.S. forces. That was what they were good for now: the land equivalent of a fleet in being. How long they could stay in being was the last important question.

  General Yamashita didn’t see things that way. Genda could hardly blame him. “Zakennayo!” Yamashita burst out. “They’re playing games with my men’s lives back in the home islands. I want to fight with some chance of victory. Gallant defeats make fine poetry, but the people the poems talk abo
ut don’t get the chance to hear them, neh?”

  “Hai. Honto,” Genda said, and it was true. He shrugged. “We’re at the end of a very long supply line, sir.”

  “No.” Yamashita shook his big head, as angry and frustrated as a baited bear. “We were on the end of a long supply line. Now the Americans have cut it off. When we took Hawaii, they couldn’t bring anything in. Now we can’t. This is not a good omen.”

  “No, sir, it’s not.” Genda could hardly disagree with that. “We have to hang on as long as we can.”

  Yamashita made a disgusted noise. “If this were some other part of the world, I’d pull back into the mountains and harass the enemy for months, maybe for years. But this is a terrible jungle to fight a war in, because you can’t live in it. There’s next to no game and next to no fruit.”

  “For a long time, we were the ones who took advantage of that, sir,” Genda said. “Escaped prisoners of war can’t live off the countryside, the way they can in Malaya or the Philippines.”

  “Prisoners.” Major General Yamashita fairly spat the word. “If we lose here, there are liable to be prisoners. Japan would lose face because of that.” With a scowl, he went on, “I assure you, though, Commander, I will not be one of those prisoners. If you are with me at the final moments, perhaps you would honor me by acting as my second.”

  “Of course, sir. It would be my privilege.” Japanese officers, soldiers, and sailors were trained to commit suicide rather than letting themselves be captured. Ritual seppuku was a survival from samurai days. Back then, a second had used his sword to take off his companion’s head after the latter began the act of slitting his belly. These days, a pistol was more common. Both weapons quickly and cleanly took the victim out of his pain. Genda felt he had to add, “I hope that day does not come.”

  “So do I—which doesn’t mean it won’t,” Yamashita said.

  Genda bit his lip and nodded. The time might also come when he needed a second—or, if he was rushed or in danger of falling into enemy hands, the inelegance of a pistol or a grenade might have to do. Trying to shove worry aside, he pointed at the map and said, “We may be able to hold them at the narrowest stretch between the mountain ranges.”

  “Maybe.” But the commanding general didn’t sound as if he believed it. “Hard to hold in the face of that much air power. And the Americans’ tanks are very good—even better than the Russian machines we fought in Mongolia in 1939.”

  Those also had to be new models, because that certainly hadn’t been true of the handful of tanks the Yankees used here in 1941. Japan did not have many tanks—and the ones she did have didn’t match up well against those of the other great powers. The Soviet Union had painfully proved that in the border war just before the fighting in Europe broke out.

  A country needed a strong automotive industry to build good tanks in quantity. Japan didn’t have one. We would have, in a few more years, Genda thought. His country had done so much so fast to hurl itself from feudalism headlong into the modern age. Japanese ships and warplanes and infantry weapons measured up to any in the world. But she hadn’t been able to do everything at once. Now the question was, how much would that cost her?

  “No more carriers, eh? No more airplanes?” Major General Yamashita said. It wasn’t really a question.

  “Please excuse me, sir, but I have to tell you it doesn’t seem likely,” Genda said.

  “Too bad. They could let us make a real fight of it.” Yamashita shook his head. “Now . . . Now I have a hard time holding on to hope. With the enemy in control of the air, with the enemy in control of the sea, all we can hope to do is delay the inevitable.”

  “I understand, sir,” Genda said. “Even that can be valuable. It wins the Empire more time to ready itself for the battles that lie ahead.”

  “Hai. A small consolation, but a consolation.” Yamashita did not sound consoled. He had to see he would die on Oahu. Genda foresaw the same fate for himself. When there was no escape, all you could do was fight. But he feared for the Empire in those coming battles. If the Americans could bring a force like this to bear wherever they chose, how could Japan hope to withstand them? And American factories and shipyards were still working at full tilt. How long before the United States could muster two such forces, or three?

  How long before Japan could muster even one? That, he feared, would take much longer.

  Admiral Yamamoto had foreseen all this. Even back when they were first beginning to plan the Pearl Harbor operation and the assault on Hawaii, Yamamoto had feared these blows wouldn’t be enough. Their success had bought Japan almost two years to conquer and consolidate. Genda hoped his country had done enough in that time to ready itself for the blows that lay ahead.

  He hoped so, yes, but he doubted he would be around to see one way or the other. “Karma, neh?” he said to Yamashita. “Shigata ga nai.” He was here because of a plan he’d offered to Admiral Yamamoto. Without it, the Japanese fleet would have struck at Oahu and then withdrawn. Genda shook his head. Bad as this was, that would have been worse. The Americans would have kept this excellent base. They would have caused Japan trouble far sooner than they were able to here in the real world.

  “Things do not always happen as we wish they would,” Yamashita said. “Our troubles here, the difficulties Germany is having in Russia . . .”

  “Yes,” Genda said. And there was another irony. Japan and the USSR were neutral. Soviet freighters could and did travel across the Pacific from Vladivostok to the U.S. West Coast and pick up arms and munitions to use against Japan’s European allies. No one interfered with them in any way. War and diplomacy were curious businesses.

  Antiaircraft guns started booming. Genda didn’t hear American fighters roaring in at treetop height to shoot up anything that moved. Instead, the rumble of engines was deeper and quieter at the same time: the planes making the racket were flying high. To Genda’s embarrassment, Yamashita realized what was going on before he did: “Their damned bombers are back!”

  He moved not a muscle. When he didn’t seek shelter, Genda could hardly do so, however much he wanted to. While they could still get planes off the ground, the Japanese had sent bombers of their own to Kauai to strike back at the planes that had dealt their airfields such a devastating blow. The pilots had reported wrecking a lot of them. Plainly, they hadn’t wrecked enough.

  Just as plainly, the American logistical push was even more impressive than Genda had thought. Those U.S. heavy bombers must have got to Kauai as near dry as made no difference. The Americans had brought along enough fuel to get a lot of them airborne again, along with bombs for them to carry.

  Maybe we should have put bigger garrisons on the other islands, Genda thought. But Oahu was the one that really counted. Either Japan would have had to pull men from here or brought in more troops overall, which meant more mouths to feed. It hadn’t seemed worthwhile.

  The ground shook under Genda as bombs burst only a few hundred meters away. Yamashita sat, impassive, in front of the map. Maybe he’d already resigned himself to death, now or before too long. Genda supposed he ought to do the same. A warrior had to, after all. But achieving that indifference, he found, came harder than it should have.

  XI

  “YOU SURE YOU OUGHT TO GO TO WORK?” OSCAR VAN DER KIRK ASKED SUSIE. “These Japs in town nowadays, they’ve got blood in their eye.”

  “I’ll be okay.” Susie was wearing the frumpiest dress she owned, but nothing on God’s green earth would make her look like Margaret Dumont. She went on, “They’re not going to shoot me any which way,” and batted those cat-blue eyes at him.

  There were times when he didn’t know whether to laugh or to pop her one. He ended up laughing now, because she would have hit back or thrown things if he did try to pop her. “You’ve got to worry about the other, too,” he said stubbornly. “Some of the things I’ve heard about those bastards—”

  Susie made an impatient gesture. “We’ve heard that stuff about the Japs ever since they
got here.”

  “Some of it’s true, too,” Oscar said.

  “Some of it, yeah, but not all of it. Most of the time, they haven’t been too bad,” Susie said. As far as Oscar was concerned, that was damning with faint praise, but Susie would do whatever she felt like doing. If the world didn’t like it, that was the world’s tough luck. As if to prove as much, she picked up her handbag, kissed him good-bye—a long, slow, delicious kiss, as if to give him something to look forward to when she got back that evening—and went out the door.

  “Jesus,” Oscar said hoarsely, listening to her footsteps receding down the hall. He shook his head, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. It didn’t want to. Susie was a hell of a piece of work—a hell of a piece, period—no two ways about it.

  Still shaking his head, he gathered up his sailboard and carried the contraption down to Waikiki Beach. To his relief, the Japs hadn’t cordoned it off with barbed wire. But they did have machine-gun nests and mortar positions camouflaged with golden sand every fifty yards or so along the beach, and more of those half-soldier, half-sailor types trotting here and there.

  Fortunately, one of their noncoms or ratings or whatever the hell he was had seen Oscar before. Oscar bowed to him—not easy when he had the big, clunky surf board under one arm and the mast and rigging and sail in his other hand, but he managed. The Jap even deigned to bow back, though not so deeply. More to the point, the tough-looking little man waved him on toward the Pacific.

  “Thanks,” Oscar said, and then, “Arigato.” He knew only a handful of Japanese words, but he’d learned that one long before the war started. It came in handy all kinds of places. And it sure came in handy now. The Jap’s face lit up; his grin exposed several gold teeth. He bowed again, this time as equal to equal, and shouted to his men. Oscar couldn’t understand any of it, but by the way they smiled and nodded it must have been good. How to win friends and influence people, he thought.