Drive to the East sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Well, it wasn’t like that, and it never would be. The thump of the gate behind Scipio and Aurelius proved as much, and proved it all too well.

  He did have a headache when he got up. Cassius scowled at him. “How can you have a good time sayin’ so long to a damn ofay?” his son demanded.

  With a sigh, Scipio answered, “It ain’t as simple as you think it is.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cassius said scornfully-he’d got to the point where he would quarrel with anything Scipio said just because Scipio said it. “How come?”

  “On account of I be dead if Jerry Dover don’t want me alive an’ workin’ there,” Scipio said. “On account of you an’ your sister an’ your mama go to a camp-or else you jus’ end up dead, too.”

  “Jerry Dover still a damn ofay,” Cassius said.

  “Fine.” Scipio didn’t feel like arguing with him, especially not with a head pounding like a drop forge. He took a couple of aspirins. They made his stomach sour, but after a while his headache receded.

  He hated walking through the cleaned-out parts of the Terry on his way to work that afternoon. Lawns grew tall and untended and full of weeds. Lots of houses had broken windows. Quite a few had doors standing open. A skinny dog trotted out of one of them and gave Scipio a hard stare. If it were a little bigger, it might have gone for him. Stray dogs scrounged whatever they could. So did stray people. The cleanouts hadn’t missed many. If not for Jerry Dover, they wouldn’t have missed Scipio and his family.

  And now Dover was in the Army. Scipio shook his head, dreading what would come next. He’d got to the age where he feared any kind of change. It was too likely to be change for the worse.

  A white man waited just inside the kitchen entrance to the Huntsman’s Lodge. “Are you Xerxes or Aurelius?” he asked.

  “I is Xerxes, suh,” Scipio answered. The new manager was younger than he’d expected-in his early forties. He had a thin, sharp, clever face and cold blue eyes. Scipio didn’t wonder why he wasn’t in the Army: he sat in a wheelchair, his legs thin and useless inside his trousers.

  “My name’s Willard Sloan,” he said, and tapped the arms of the chair with his own arms, which seemed fine. A moment later, he explained why: “Stopped a damnyankee bullet with my back in 1917. I used to be a hell of a football player, you know? So much for that.” His mouth twisted. Then he went on, “Jerry Dover says you’ve been here since dirt. If I need to know anything special, I’m supposed to ask you.”

  “I tells you anything I knows, suh.” Scipio meant it. He didn’t expect the white man to like him. It might end up happening, but he didn’t expect it. If Sloan found him useful, that would do almost as well.

  “All right. If I have to pick your brains, I’ll holler. For now, you just go on about your business the way you always have. I’ll keep an eye on things, cipher out how they are, before I decide what works good and what needs tinkering.”

  “Fair enough, suh. Dis place been de bes’ in town a long time. Sure enough want to keep it dat way,” Scipio said. He and the rest of the staff would be judging Willard Sloan as he judged them. The only trouble was, his judgment carried more weight than theirs.

  He did start well. When the cooks were unhappy with some of the beef they got, he used the telephone like a deadly weapon. “You bastard, you reckon you can screw me over on account of I ain’t Dover?” he screamed at the butcher. “You reckon I don’t know Chet Byers? You reckon I won’t do business with him from here on out if you ever pull this shit on me again? Make it right in fifteen minutes, or I blacken your name all over town.” New beef-of the proper quality-got there in twelve minutes flat. Jerry Dover couldn’t have done better, and there was no higher praise than that.

  XVII

  Autumn was when the leaves turned red and gold and then fell off the trees. It was when the weather got crisp, so your cheeks also turned red and tingled after you’d stayed outside a while. If you were a fisherman on the North Atlantic, it was when the ocean started tossing you around, not knowing-or caring-your boat was out there.

  George Enos, Jr., was used to the rhythms of the changing year. A Massachusetts man had to be. In the Sandwich Islands, the year didn’t change much. The sun still rode high in the sky, if not quite so high. Days remained warm. Everything stayed green.

  Bigger swells did start rolling in out of the north. The Townsend would slide up over a crest and then down into a trough. That didn’t seem enough to get excited about.

  When George said so out loud, Fremont Dalby laughed at him. “Christ, Enos, haven’t you had enough excitement for a while?” the gun chief said. “Far as I’m concerned, I can stay at my station and gather dust for a while, because that’ll mean nobody’s trying to strafe the ship or drop a bomb on her or stick a torpedo up our ass.”

  “Japs are out there somewhere,” George said.

  “I know, I know. You don’t got to remind me,” Dalby said. “But I don’t like thinking about it every goddamn minute, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure, Chief.” George didn’t want to get the CPO ticked off at him. Getting any CPO ticked off at you was a bad idea. When the man in question happened to be your boss, it was four times as bad.

  They kept station with three other destroyers and with the Trenton. The escort carrier hadn’t taken too much damage in her last brush with the Japanese. Her airplanes had given out more than she’d got. That was the first real naval victory the USA had had in the islands around the Sandwich Islands for quite a while.

  U.S. fighters buzzed overhead. They flew a dawn-to-dusk combat air patrol. The Townsend’s Y-ranging antenna went round and round. Y-ranging gear could spot incoming enemy aircraft while they were still well out to sea. The other destroyers and the carrier all had sets, too. Whatever else happened, the Japs wouldn’t be able to get in a sucker punch at the little flotilla. The Trenton would be able to scramble all her fighters. The destroyers would start throwing up as much anti-aircraft as they could. And after that, what could you do but pucker your asshole and hope?

  Fritz Gustafson pointed off to starboard. The loader didn’t bother with words when one finger would do. Fremont Dalby wasn’t shy about words, though. “Dolphins!” he said with a smile. “They’re supposed to be good luck. Here’s hoping, anyway.”

  George enjoyed the dolphins for their own sake. They were swift and graceful and, as always, they looked as if they were having a good time out there. “I wonder what they make of us,” he said. “Till we got ships like this, they were some of the biggest, toughest things in the ocean.”

  “They figure we’re good for a handout, anyway,” Dalby said, which was true. They would follow ships for scraps and garbage. Sometimes, though, they would track ships for what looked like nothing more than the hell of it. Were they skylarking? Did they really have the brains to play? More to the point, did they have the brains not to want to work? For their sake, George hoped so.

  Four hours on, four hours off. When the other crew for the twin 40mm mount replaced Dalby’s, George went below, grabbed himself a couple of sandwiches and some coffee, and then found his hammock. He laughed as he climbed up into it. “What’s so funny?” asked another sailor about to grab some shut-eye.

  “Used to be I couldn’t sleep for beans in one of these goddamn things,” George answered. “Used to be I couldn’t hardly get into one without falling out on my ear. But now I don’t even think about it.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re a real Navy guy now,” the other sailor said, getting up into his hammock as nimbly as a chimp might have. “You know how to do shit. You aren’t a little lost civilian anymore, looking for somebody to hold your hand and tell you what to do.”

  Was I really that green? George wondered, wiggling to get comfortable. He supposed he had been. He knew the sea from his fisherman days, but knowing the sea and knowing the Navy weren’t the same thing-not even close. He settled his cap over his eyes. Two minutes later, he was snoring.

  Standing watch and watch wore on a man. He
felt groggy, almost underwater, when he slid out of the hammock and down to the deck again. He got rid of some of the coffee he’d drunk just after he came off the last watch, then went back to the galley for more. It might help keep him conscious, anyway.

  Fremont Dalby was at the gun when he got there. The CPO looked fresh and fit. Maybe Dalby didn’t need to sleep. George yawned. He damn well did, and he hadn’t done enough of it. “All quiet?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Dalby answered. “We’re getting up toward Midway, too.”

  “Uh-huh.” George looked north and west, as if he expected the atoll to come over the horizon any minute now. He didn’t; they weren’t that close, not by three or four hundred miles. “Anything from the Y-range?”

  “Quiet as a mouse, far as I know,” Dalby said. “Way it looks to me is, the Japs haven’t got a carrier operating south of the island.”

  “Makes sense,” George agreed. “If they did, they would’ve figured out we’re around by now. Hell, we’re almost close enough for land-based air from Midway to spot us.”

  “Almost is the word,” the gun chief said. “And if they don’t have a carrier operating south of Midway, we really have made them pull in their horns. Us coming up here is a lot better than them bombing the crap out of Oahu.”

  “You better believe it,” George said. “It’d be good if we could push ’em off Midway, too. Where would they go then?”

  “Wake,” Fremont Dalby replied at once. “It’s another pissant little bird turd of an island southwest of Midway. But I’ll be damned if I’d want to hop from island to island across the whole stinking Pacific toward Japan.”

  “Oh, good God, no!” George shuddered at the very idea. “You’d have to be crazy to try something like that. You’d have to be crazy to want to. As long as they get out of the Sandwich Islands and stay away, that’s plenty. This is a big goddamn ocean. There’s room enough for us and them.”

  “That’s how it looks to me, too,” Dalby said. “Of course, how it looks to Philadelphia is anybody’s guess. The big brains back there can screw up anything if they put their minds to it. Minds!” He rolled his eyes. “If they had any, we’d all be better off.”

  “Treason,” Fritz Gustafson said. “Off with your head.”

  Dalby suggested that the loader lose some other organ important for happiness, if not absolutely necessary for personal survival. Gustafson didn’t say another word. He’d got his lick in, and he was content.

  George’s watch passed quietly. No warning shouts of approaching Japanese airplanes came from the loudspeakers. The hydrophones didn’t pick up telltale noises from lurking Japanese submersibles. No torpedoes from lurking submersibles the hydrophone hadn’t picked up arrowed through the water toward the Townsend.

  When the other crew took over the gun, George went down to the galley for more sandwiches and coffee. He felt as if he’d done the same thing just a few hours earlier. Of course, he had done the same thing, so no wonder he felt that way. These sandwiches were ham on wheat, not corned beef on rye. Other than that, he might have been running the film over again. Standing watch and watch made time blur. George tried to come up with the name of the artist who’d painted the pocket watch sagging and melting as if it were left out in the rain. It was something foreign, that was all he could remember.

  Yawning, he headed for his hammock. “Here we go again,” he said as he climbed up into it.

  The sailor he’d talked with the last time he sacked out laughed. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said. “People will get suspicious.”

  George laughed, too, a little nervously. Was that just a joke, or did something faggoty hide underneath it? Aboard ship, you always wondered. The Townsend went back to Oahu often enough to let the crew get their ashes hauled on Hotel Street, but you wondered anyway. Some guys were flat-out queers, no two ways about it, and they couldn’t have cared less about the floozies on Hotel Street.

  But you couldn’t call somebody on what was probably nothing but a harmless joke. If the other guy didn’t make another like it, George figured he would forget about this one. If he did… I’ll worry about that later. With another yawn, an enormous one, George decided to worry about everything later, and went to sleep.

  Night had fallen when he came back up on deck with another mug of coffee. It was cool and quiet: no CAP after dark. Fremont Dalby got to the 40mm mount with a mug of his own. He nodded to George and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  Him, too? “Uh, yeah,” George said. He could imagine a lot of things, but the gun chief as a homo? Never in a million years.

  “Should be a little easier this time through,” Dalby said. “We don’t have airplanes coming at us with bombs or torpedoes during the night.”

  “Or trying to crash into us, either,” George put in.

  “Yeah, that was fun, wasn’t it?” Dalby said. Fun wasn’t the word George would have used. He didn’t know which one he would have used, but it wasn’t one he would see in any family newspaper.

  “All we gotta worry about now is submarines,” Fritz Gustafson said. As usual, the loader didn’t talk much. Also as usual, he got a lot of mileage out of what he did say.

  Fremont Dalby’s suggestion about what submarines could do was illegal, immoral, and impossible. George stared out over the black waters of the Pacific. Starlight glittered off the sea, but the moon was down. A dozen submersibles could have been playing ring around the rosy half a mile from the Townsend and he never would have known it. Out in the tropical Atlantic, a Confederate boat had sneaked up on his father’s destroyer and sunk it in the middle of the night. The same thing could happen to him. At times like this, he knew it much too well.

  Then Dalby said, “Those bastards have as much trouble finding us at night as we do finding them.”

  That was true enough, and reassuring to boot. Besides, what would a Jap sub be doing out here in the middle of the night? George wished he hadn’t asked the question, because he saw an obvious answer: looking for American ships. If a submersible could, it would probably go after the Trenton ahead of the Townsend, but it might take whatever it could get.

  He kept his nerves to himself. He didn’t want his buddies to know he’d got the wind up. Odds were he was flabbling over nothing. He understood that, which didn’t make not doing it any easier.

  The watch passed quietly. No airplanes. No submarines. No nothing. Just the wide Pacific and, somewhere not far away, the rest of the flotilla. The other crew took over the gun. George went below for food and coffee and sleep. Coffee had trouble keeping him awake through watch and watch.

  He came back on at four in the morning, and watched the sun rise out of the sea. The flotilla turned away from Midway during his watch, and started back towards Oahu. Now the United States were doing the poking. He hoped Japan liked getting poked.

  “Hey, Mistuh Guard, suh.”

  Hipolito Rodriguez swung the muzzle of his submachine gun toward the Negro who’d spoken to him. The motion was automatic and not particularly hostile. He just didn’t believe in taking chances. “What you want?” he asked.

  “What I want?” The skinny black man laughed. “Mistuh Guard, suh, I got me a list long as your arm, but gettin’ let outa here do the job all by its ownself.” Rodriguez waited stonily. That wouldn’t happen, and the Negro had to know it. He did; the laughter leaked out of his face as he went on, “What I wants to ask you, suh, is where them niggers from Jackson is at now. They come through here, but they don’t hardly stop for nothin’.”

  “Some go to Lubbock,” Rodriguez answered. “Some go to El Paso.” He was stubborn about sticking to the story the guards told the Negroes in Camp Determination. Not all the mallates believed it. But they weren’t sure what really had happened, which was all to the good.

  This prisoner looked sly. “That a really fo’-true fac’, suh?”

  “Of course it is.” Rodriguez lied without hesitation. He had as much of an interest in keeping the Negroes quiet as Jef
ferson Pinkard did himself.

  “Ain’t how I hear it,” the fellow said.

  “What you hear, then?” Rodriguez asked. “Tell me what you hear. Tell me who you hear it from, too.”

  “Well…” The Negro suddenly realized he might have talked more than was good for him. “I ain’t so sure I recollects now.”

  “No, eh?” Now the muzzle of Rodriguez’s submachine gun pointed toward the man’s midsection in a businesslike way. “Maybe we take you back. Maybe we ask some questions. We find out who telling lies here, si?”

  The black man couldn’t turn pale. If he could have, he would have. If he could have, he would have disappeared. Since he couldn’t, he said, “You don’ need to do nothin’ like that, Mistuh Guard, suh. My memory, it’s much better all sudden-like.”

  “Bueno. Glad to hear it,” Rodriguez said dryly. “Tell me, then-what you hear?”

  “Well…” the Negro repeated. He licked his lips. “I don’t say this or nothin’-not me. I jus’ hear it.” Rodriguez gestured impatiently with the submachine gun. A weapon that could cut a man in half in the blink of an eye made a hell of a persuader. The black man spoke up in a hurry: “Some folks say them niggers didn’t go nowheres. Some folks say they was kilt.”

  Some folks were right-dead right. “Who say stupid things like this?” Rodriguez asked. The Negro hesitated. He didn’t want to squeal on his friends, even with the threat from the submachine gun. Rodriguez asked a different question, one that seemed safer on the outside: “What barracks you live in?”

  “I’s in Barracks Twenty-seven, suh,” the Negro said.

  “Twenty-seven.” Rodriguez turned to the guards with him. “Remember that.”

  “Will do, Troop Leader,” the three of them said as if they were one man. Rodriguez had discovered he liked wearing three stripes on his sleeve. He gave more orders than he took these days. In orders as in many other things, it was better to give than to receive.