Tales of the South Pacific - James A. Michener [152]
There were more Japs on the island than we had anticipated. It would be incorrect to say that the SeaBees had to stop operations in order to fight the yellow devils, but each working party had to have infantry protection. If Marines were not available, SeaBees had to provide their own snipers. Artisans forty years old who had expected to work in Pearl Harbor and sleep between sheets, swore, bitched, and grabbed rifles. I doubt if the SeaBees altogether killed two Japs. But they sure used up a pile of ammunition!
By the third day the Marines had a perimeter safely established. That night at seven o'clock Pearlstein reached his first objective: the coral hill. Billis and some rowdies set up a terrific small-arms barrage in honor of the event. The Marine commandant sent a special runner to see what had happened. He was furious when he heard the explanation, and called for Hoag.
"I won't have your men firing that way!" he snapped.
"Yes, sir!" Hoag replied briskly. But he said nothing to anybody about the rebuke.
On the fifth day, with tractors and bulldozers making a shambles of Konora, I went to see how the live-coral project was developing. In the lagoon, within the protecting angle of the bend, an energetic crew had established a dredging process. They had half a dozen massive steel maws which they sank onto the coral bottom. The maws were then slowly dragged onto the beach, where a tripping device threw the collected coral into piles. As I watched, a giant steam shovel came slowly out of the jungle behind me, like a pterodactyl. It moved with horrible slowness, crunchingness, and grinding. It took up a position on the beach from which it could scoop up the live coral. Trucks were already waiting for their first loads.
"Would you like to see what we're getting?" an officer asked me. I went with him to the farthest dredge. We waited until a fresh batch was hauled in and tripped. Then we stepped forward to examine the catch.
In the crushed pile at our feet we saw a wonderland. Coral grows like an underwater bush. It is of many colors, ranging from exquisite pastel greens to violent, bleeding reds. There is blue coral, orange, purple, gray, amethyst, and even now and then a bush of stark, black coral. Like human beings, it grows white as it approaches death.
The officer broke off a branch of living coral and handed it to me. It was purple, and was composed of a stony base, already calcified. Next that was a pulpy, mineral segment, pale white in color. The extreme tip was almost purely vegetable. It exuded a sticky milk which smelled noxiously. Over all were suction caps like those on the tentacles of an octopus. They were potential tips which had not matured.
It was impossible to believe that this tiny organism and its stony shell had raised the island on which we stood and was at that moment raising thousands of new islands throughout the Pacific, most of which would never break the waves but would remain subterranean palaces of rare wonder. It was equally difficult to believe that the evil smelling whitish milk would shortly go to work for the SeaBees!
The days dragged on. I saw little of Pearlstein, but I heard that he had run into all sorts of trouble. On the seventh day he got more than his share. A Jap bomber came over, one of nine that tried, and laid an egg right on Pearlstein's steam shovel. Killed two men and wounded one. The shovel was wrecked. I was sent up to see what I could do to get him another.
Pearlstein had tears in his eyes. "Goddam it all," he said. "You try and try! Then something like this happens!" He surveyed the ruined shovel. I knew little about machinery, but it seemed to me that the shovel was not too badly wrecked. After the dead bodies were removed, we studied what was