In the Balance (10 page)

Yeager hesitated a moment more, but the rising shriek in the sky got him moving. He leapt down, landed heavily. For an instant, he thought he was going to take another fall on that ankle of his, but he managed to catch his balance and stay upright. Young corn plants beat against his legs as he ran between the rows. Their sweet, moist smell took him back to his boyhood.

Mutt Daniels tackled him, lay on top of him in the dirt. “What the hell you doin’, Mutt?” he demanded indignantly.

“If he’s comin’ back for another pass, you don’t want to give him no movin’ target to shoot at,” Daniels said. “Learned that in France back in nineteen an’ eighteen. Hadn’t thought about it in twenty-odd years, but the stink of blood and shit in that there car brought it right back up to the top o’ my mind.”

“Oh.” So Yeager wasn’t the only one who’d had an odor jog his memory. His dredged-up piece of past seemed happier than Mutt’s, though.

The plane’s gun cut loose just then, lashing the derailed train with another whip of fire. Yeager buried his face in the cool, damp earth. Beside him, Daniels did the same thing. The enemy airplane streaked away. This time, it did not sound as if it was coming back.

“Jesus,” Mutt said, cautiously getting up on hands and knees. “Never thought I’d be under artillery fire again, though that’s just a squirrel gun if you set it alongside what the Germans threw at us.”

Yeager gaped at his manager. He hadn’t imagined there could be anything worse than what he’d just been through. He tried to pull himself together. “We’ve got to get the people out of there, Mutt,” he said. His legs wobbled under him when he stood up. That made him angry; he’d never been shot at before, and didn’t understand what reaction could do.

“Reckon you’re right,” Daniels said. “Good Lord’s own miracle the whole train’s not on fire.” He looked at his hands. “Son of a bitch—I got the shakes. Ain’t done that since nineteen an’ eighteen, neither.”

Yeager looked at his hands, too. Now they were steady enough, but that wasn’t what he noticed about them: though night had come, he could see them clearly. The train might not have been set afire, but the northern horizon was ablaze. Two big cement plants in Dixon were going up in flames, and most of the rest of the town seemed to be burning, too.

The red flickering light showed Yeager more people scrambling out of the derailed train, and others standing in the cornfield like him and Mutt He looked down toward the locomotive, and saw at once why the train had overturned: the engine and the coal car behind it had tumbled into a bomb crater.

Mutt Daniels’ head made that same slow, incredulous traverse from north to south. “Saw this so’t of thing plenty of times in France. My grandpappy talked about what it was like in the States War. I never reckoned the U.S. of A. would get it like this, though.”

Yeager hadn’t started thinking about the whole United States yet. The ruined train in front of him was disaster enough to fill his mind for the moment. He started toward it, repeating, “We got to help those people, Mutt.”

Daniels took a couple of steps with him, then grabbed him by the sleeve and held him back. “I hear more planes comin’. Mebbe we don’t wanna get too close to a big target.”

Sure enough, a new drone was in the air, or rather several drones, like a swarm of deep-voice bees. They didn’t sound like the screaming monster that had bombed the track and shot up the train. “Maybe they’re ours,” Yeager said hopefully.

“Mebbe.” The drones got louder. Daniels went on, “Y’all can do what you want, Sam, but I ain’t gonna get out in the open till I see the stars painted on their sides. You get shot at from the air once or twice, you plumb lose the taste for it.” The manager squatted, ducked under the corn.

Yeager walked a little closer to the train, more slowly with each stride. He still wanted to rescue the people there, but Daniels’ caution made a solid kind of sense … and the closer those droning engines got, the less they sounded like the airplanes with which Yeager was familiar. He got down on his belly. If he was wrong to take cover, he’d cost himself and the injured people on the train a minute or two. But if he was right …

He rolled onto his side so he could look up through the corn-stalks’ bent green leaves. By the sound, the approaching airplanes were hardly moving: in fact, by the sound they weren’t moving at all, just hanging in midair.
But that’s impossible
, Yeager thought. Then he saw one of the aircraft, lit up against the night by Dixon’s burning cement factories.

The briefest glimpse told him it was no American plane. It hardly looked like a plane at all—more like a flying polliwog. Then Yeager
noticed the spinning disk above it. His mind seized on the hovering gyros in Heinlein’s “If This Goes On—” But what were those flying marvels from a story set far in the future doing in here-and-now Illinois?

He found the answer a moment later, when they opened fire. The noise of the automatic guns sounded like a giant ripping endless sheets of canvas. He didn’t stick his head up to find out what had happened to the people standing in the cornfield. He just thanked his lucky stars—and Mutt Daniels—that he hadn’t been one of them.

Staying as low as he could, he crawled backward through the plants. He hoped their waving above him as he moved wouldn’t give him away. If it did, he hoped the end would be quick and clean.

He kept backing up, wondering all the while when he’d bump into. Mutt. Surely he’d retreated past where the manager had ducked down. “Idiot,” he muttered under his breath. If Mutt had an ounce of sense—and Mutt had a lot more than an ounce—he was getting away from the derailed train, too.

A couple of the gyros settled to earth, one on either side of the train. The one that landed on the eastern side happened to be directly in front of Yeager. His curiosity wrestled down his own good sense, and he stuck out his head far enough to peer out between the rows of corn: he had to know who was attacking the United States. Germans or Japanese, they’d regret it.

His vision path was so narrow that he needed most of a minute to get his first glimpse of an invader. When he did, he thought the soldier had to be a Jap—he was too little to be a German. Then Yeager got a better look at the way the figure by the train moved, the shape of its head

He turned around and crawled through the corn as fast as he could go. He wanted to get up and run, but that would have drawn the invaders’ attention for certain. He didn’t dare do that, not now.

He almost crawled right over Mutt Daniels, who was still retreating slowly and carefully, head toward the front. “Watch it, boy,” Daniels hissed. “You want to get the both of us killed?”

“I saw them, Mutt.” Yeager needed all the willpower he possessed to keep his voice low—to keep from screaming, as a matter of fact. He made himself take a deep breath, let it out slowly. Then he continued, “I saw who got down from those hover-planes of theirs.”

“Well, who?” the manager demanded when Yeager went no further. “Was it the Boches”—he pronounced it
Boash
—“or the goddamn Japs?”

“Neither one,” Yeager said.

“Got to be one or the other,” Daniels said. Then he let out a wheezy laugh. “You ain’t gonna tell me it’s the Eyetalians, are you?”

Yeager shook his head. He wished he hadn’t left his
Astounding
on the train. “Remember that Orson Welles Halloween radio show three, four
years ago, the one about Martians that scared the country half out of its shoes?”

“Sure, I remember. Didn’t hear it myself, mind, but I sure heard about it later. But what’s that got to do with—” Daniels broke off, stared. “You expect me to believe—?”

“Mutt, I swear to God it’s true. The Martians have landed, for real this time.”

One second, Bobby Fiore was spooning up thin vegetable soup in the dining car of the train. He’d already spent some time thinking disparaging thoughts about it. All right, there was a war on, so you really couldn’t expect much in the way of meat or chicken. But vegetable soup didn’t have to be dishwater and limp celery. Give his mother some zucchini, carrots, maybe a potato or two, and just a few spices—mind you, just a few—and, she’d make you a soup worth, eating, now. The cook here was cheap or lazy or both.

The next second, everything went to pieces. Fiore heard the same roaring wail in the sky Yeager had, the same twin blasts. Then the train slammed on the brakes, and then it went off the track. Fiore flew through the air. The side of his head fetched up against the side of a table. A silver light flared behind his eyes before everything spiraled down into darkness.

When he woke up, he thought he’d died and gone to hell. He felt like it; his head pounded like a drum in a swing band, and his vision was blurry and distorted. Blurry or no, the face he saw looked more like a devil than anything else, he could think of. It sure
(as hell
whispered through his mind) didn’t belong to any human being he’d ever set eyes on.

The thing had sharper teeth, and more of them, than a person had any business having, and a forked tongue like a snake’s to go with them. It also had eyes that reminded him of those he’d seen on a chameleon in the Pittsburgh zoo when he was a kid: each in its own little conical mounting, with one quite capable of looking north while the other looked south.

Remembering the chameleon was the first thing that made Fiore wonder if he truly had ended up in Satan’s country. The devil—or even
a
devil—should have looked more supernatural and less like a lizard, even an African lizard.

Then he noticed he was still in the flipped dining car, for that matter, he had a butter knife lying on his stomach and a sesame seed roll by one shoe. He was certain hell had to have worse pangs than a dining car, no matter how bad the soup in this one was.
Had been
, he corrected himself.

The—well, if it wasn’t a
devil
, it had to be a
thing
—the thing, then, pointed what looked like a gun at the butter knife near Fiore’s belly button.
If he wasn’t in hell at the moment, he realized, he could get there in a hurry. He smiled the smile a dog smiles after it’s lost a fight. “You want to be careful with that,” he said, and hoped he was right.

The thing hissed something in reply. Fourteen years of playing ball all over the United States and with and against players with parents from all over Europe and Latin America left Fiore able to recognize a double handful of languages, and swear in several of them. This wasn’t any he knew, or anything close.

The thing spoke again, and jerked the barrel of the gun. That Fiore understood. He staggered to his feet, wondering as he did so whether his abused head would fall off. The thing made no effort to help him while he swayed. Indeed, it skittered back to make sure he couldn’t reach it.

“If you think I’m bluffing, you’re outta your mind,” he said. It ignored him. Considering that it came up only to the middle of his chest (and he needed shoes to make the five-eight he always claimed), maybe it had reason to be nervous of him, although he doubted he could have squashed a slug if you gave it a running start.

At another motion of the gun barrel, he started walking forward. After three or four steps, he came to the body of the colored steward. The fellow had a hole in the back of his white mess jacket big enough to throw a cat through. Pieces of him poked through the hole. Fiore’s stomach did a flipflop. The gun at his back concentrated his mind remarkably, however. Gulping, he walked on.

Only a few people had been in the dining car when it derailed. So far as Fiore could tell, he was the only person left alive (he did not count his captor as qualifying). The side of the car—actually, it served as the roof just now—was pierced in a dozen places by bullet holes that let in the warm night air. Fiore shivered. Only dumb luck had kept him from stopping a round, or more than one, while he lay unconscious.

The thing made him scramble out of the dining car. More creatures just like it waited outside. For no good reason, that startled the ballplayer—he hadn’t imagined there could be more than one of them.

He saw he wasn’t the only person being hustled toward some peculiar gadgets that sat on the ground by the train. Not until another of them thundered past overhead did he realize they were flying machines. They didn’t look like any flying machines he’d seen before.

One of the captured people tried to run. Fiore had also been thinking about that. He was glad he’d only thought about it when the things—he still didn’t know what else to call them—shot the fleeing man in the back. Just as their flying machines didn’t look like airplanes, their guns didn’t sound like rifles. They sounded like machine guns; he’d heard machine guns once or twice, at fairs after the first World War.

Running away from somebody—or even something—carrying a machine gun wasn’t smart. So Fiore let himself be herded onto the flying machine and into a too-small seat. A good many of the scaly things joined him, but no people. The machine took off. His stomach gave a lurch different from the one he’d felt when he stepped over the dead steward. He’d never been off the ground before.

The things chattered among themselves as they flew through the night. Fiore had no idea which way they were going. He kept sneaking glances at his watch. After about two hours, the darkness outside, the little window turned light, not with daytime but with spots like the ones at a ballpark.

These spots didn’t show bleachers, though. They showed—Fiore gaped for the right word. Spaceships? Rockets? They had to be something like that.
Sam Yeager would know for sure
, he thought, and suddenly felt ashamed at teasing his friend over that stupid science-fiction magazine … which turned out not to have been so stupid after all.

Then he wondered if Yeager was still alive, if he was, he’d have found out about the Martians, too.

3