The Golden Globe

"I didn't tell her anything," Sparky said. "Not about you."

Valentine put his arm around his son, patted his shoulder.

"Of course not," he said, smiling. "I never thought you did."

"We'll look bad if we just cancel at this point," Sparky said. "The pad's been hawking this series for a week now. I thought it'd be good publicity."

Valentine considered that, began nodding slowly.

"Besides," Sparky pointed out, "it's not a review. People have printed nasty things about you before. You know how it is."

"Maybe you're right," Valentine said.

"You said it yourself. You're not an easy man to like." Sparky knew his father took pride in this, attributed it to his artistic perfectionism. It was even partly true.

Valentine laughed, and squeezed his son's shoulder.

"You're right. Nothing to get upset about. I guess I'm just on edge, with the theater so close to completion." He tossed the newspad down on the dirt dugout floor, where it mingled with a hundred old pink wads of bubble gum and puddles of spilled cola. "That's not what I came out here for, anyway. A few things have come up we're going to have to go over together."

"About the theater?'

"That's right. If we hurry we can make it back before they shut down for the day."

"But I've got a game going—"

"It really can't wait, Ke

Sparky felt his face grow warm. Jeff and some of the other boys were carefully studying the field.

The hell of it was, it was true. An inch this week, a few more inches the next, in no time he'd be a man.

He already was a man, inside. He'd been an impostor here from the begi

It was over here, and Sparky knew it.

But couldn't he have finished this last game?

"Gotta go, fellas," he said, getting up. "Sorry, but it's an emergency."

"Sure, Sparky."

"Hey, good game, Spark-man!"

"What a play! They'll be talking about that one tonight."

He went down the line, shaking hands, getting pats on the rump, nobody mentioning he wouldn't be back, but everyone aware of it.

Suddenly he knew, without knowing how he knew, that these boys knew exactly who he was, and had from the first. He had a vivid vision of a group of them hiding in the hayloft, alert for approaching parents, gathered around a clandestine throwaway television set. Tuning in to the latest episode of Sparky and His Gang. Of course they knew. And the wonderful thing was, in all the time he'd been coming here no one had ever asked him for an autograph or a souvenir from the set. But they knew he was about to grow up, and they knew they would never see him again. He looked at the ground where his father had thrown the newspad. It had vanished. Soon it would be squirreled away in somebody's sock drawer, to be brought out in the dead of night and read by candlelight.

Impulsively, he thrust his prized outfielder's mitt into the hands of a surprised Jan Stoltzfus, another boy about to become a young man, but at the normal rate. Soon he'd be playing with the grown-ups. They embraced, and Sparky turned away, followed his father around the backstop and off the field.

The tu

He hadn't really thought this growing-up business was going to change his life that much. The thing was, he had already thought of himself as grown up. True, he was small, he had a child's body, but his mind was that of a mature man. For that matter, he sometimes thought he'd been born mature. He didn't recall a time when he hadn't had an adult's outlook on life, shouldered a man's burdens. His relationship to John Valentine was sometimes more of a father to a reckless son than the other way around.

But this was going to change everything. You didn't just get a larger uniform when you grew up, when you got bigger. You put away baseball for good.

Sure, he could get into an adult league of duffers, smack the ol' pill around in his spare time, weekends, after work. But he knew without even trying it that it wouldn't be the same. Adult baseball was a way to keep the weight off without surgery, stretch the muscles. Maintenance on the old ticker, you shouldn't need a new one every five years. For the pros it was a job, but Sparky would never be that good. To a kid, baseball was a world unto itself. Baseball was youth.

"Why do I get the impression you haven't heard a word I've said?"

"What?" Sparky looked up. "Oh, I guess I was just somewhere else."

John Valentine made a noncommittal grunt, then reached behind him and took a twenty-dollar beefsteak tomato from a basket full of them. He bit into it. Juice and seeds ran down his chin.

"I never even knew these people were out here," Valentine said. "Had a hell of a time finding the place."

"They don't get a lot of visitors," Sparky said.

"No television, you said. No movies. What do they do for entertainment? Any live theater?"

"I don't think they approve of that, either. They farm, mostly. Work the soil. The women quilt, you know, sew these big blanket things. They're worth a fortune when they're done. They cook wonderful food."

"Maybe we should have bought a pie or something."

"They don't sell those. Or the muffins."

"Smelled pretty good to me." He took another bite of the tomato. "This is a good tomato, too, but not worth what they were charging up there at the farmer's market." He tossed the remains of the tomato off the back of the wagon.

"No," Sparky said. "Probably not."

I never did get another of those muffins. But to this day, when I smell cornbread, I think of Amish baseball.

The first leg of the Halley's odyssey was Uranus to Jupiter, a trip not often made since the Invasion, two hundred years ago. Technically, it was illegal to approach Jupiter, but people did it from time to time and almost always got away with it. Space had always been too vast to really police, and Jupiter wasn't in the jurisdiction of any human-inhabited world. The only nation really interested in total interdiction was Luna, the grandly and rather nervously named Outpost State, which had existed for two hundred years only a quarter of a million miles away from the Invaders. The aliens had landed on Earth and on Jupiter. On Earth, they had wiped out all human life and destroyed all trace of human existence. What they did on Jupiter was anybody's guess. There had been no commerce humanity was aware of between the two planets in all that time. Luna would like it to stay that way. There was no reason to doubt the Invaders could finish the job, destroy all humanity, in a weekend if they took the notion. It seemed wise never to give them a reason, and therefore wise never to call too much attention to the affairs of humans.