In the Balance

“Did you-see that?” Ken Embry asked in a tiny voice.

“I-think so,” Bagnall answered as cautiously. He wasn’t quite sure he believed in the terrible apparition himself. “Where did the Germans come up with it?”

“Can’t be German,” the pilot said. “We know what they have, same as they know about us. My dad in a Spitfire above the. Somme is likelier than a Jerry in-that.”

“Well, if he’s not a German, who the devil is he?” Bagnall asked.

“Damned if I know, and I don’t care to hang about and learn, in case he decides to come back.” Embry banked away from, the track of the impossible fighter.

“Ground flak-” Bagnall said as he watched the altimeter unwind. Embry ignored him. He shut up, feeling foolish. When set against this monster that swept bombers from the sky like a charwoman wielding her broom against spilled salt, ground flak was hardly worth worrying about.

Jens Larssen’s thumb throbbed fiercely. The nail was already turning black; he suspected he’d lose it. He scowled as darkly as his fair, su

The evening sun at his back, he tramped along Fifty-seventh Street toward the Quadrangle Club. His appetite wasn’t what it had been before he’d tried driving his thumbnail into a two-by-four, but food and coffee kept him going in place of sleep. As soon as he’d gulped his meal, he’d be back at the pile again, hammering away-this time, with luck, a little more carefully.

He sucked in a lungful of muggy Chicago air. Having been born and raised in San Francisco, he wondered why three million people chose to live in a place that was too hot and sticky half the time and too damned cold most of the rest.

“They have to be crazy,” he said aloud.

A student going the other way gave him an odd look. He felt himself flush. Dressed as he was in a dirty undershirt and a pair of chinos, he didn’t look like anyone who belonged on the University of Chicago campus, let alone a faculty member. He’d draw more looks in the Quadrangle Club. Too bad for the Latin professors in their moth-eaten Harris tweeds, he thought.

He walked past Cobb Gate; the grotesques carved on the big stone pile that was the northern entrance to Hull Court always made him smile. Botany Pond, surrounded on three sides by the Hull Biological Laboratories, was a nice place to sit and read when he had the time. Lately, he hadn’t had the time very often.

He was coming up to Mitchell Tower when his shadow disappeared. One second it stretched out ahead of him, all fine and proper, the next it was gone. The tower, modeled after that of Magdalen College at Oxford, was suddenly bathed in harsh white light.

Larssen stared up into the sky. The glowing spot there grew and faded and changed color as he watched. Everyone around was pointing at it and exclaiming: “What’s that?” “What could it be?” “Have you ever seen anything like that in all your life?” People stuck their heads out of windows and came ru

The physicist watched and gaped with everyone else. Little by little, the new light dimmed and his old, familiar shadow reasserted itself. Before it had fully recovered, Larssen wheeled and began ru

He didn’t answer. He just ran harder toward Stagg Field. The fire was in the sky. He knew what sort of fire it had to be, too: the fire he and his colleagues were seeking to call forth from the uranium atom. So far, no atomic pile in the United States had even managed a self-sustaining chain reaction. The crew in the west stands was trying to put together one that would.

No one in his most horrid nightmares imagined the Germans had already devised not just a pile but a bomb, even if the uranium atom had first been split in Germany in 1938. As he ran, Larssen wondered how the Nazis had exploded a bomb over Chicago. So far as he knew, their planes couldn’t reach even New York.

For that matter, he wondered why the Germans had set off their bomb so high overhead-too high, really, for it to do any damage. Maybe, he thought, they had it aboard some oceanbestriding rocket like the ones the pulp magazines talked about. But no one had dreamed the Germans could do that, either.

Nothing about the bomb made any rational sense. The dreadful thing was up there, though, and had to be German. It surely wasn’t American or English.

Larssen had an even more horrid thought. What if it was Japanese? He didn’t think the Japs had the know-how to build an atomic bomb, but he hadn’t thought they had the know-how to bomb Pearl Harbor so devastatingly well, or to take the Philippines, or Guam, or Wake, or Hong Kong and Singapore and Burma from the British, or practically drive the Royal Navy out of the Indian Ocean, or… The further he went, the longer the melancholy list in his head grew.

“Maybe it is the goddamn Japs,” he said, and ran harder than ever.

Sam Yeager had the curtain closed over the train window by his seat, to keep the westering sun out of Bobby Fiore’s eyes while his roommate slept. In his younger days, he would have resented that: having grown up without traveling more than a couple of days’ ride from his folks’ farm, he was wild to see as much of the country as he could when he started playing ball. Train and bus windows were his openings on a wider world.

“I’ve seen the country, all right,” he muttered. He’d rolled through just about every piece of it, with swings into Canada and Mexico to boot. Rubbernecking for one more swing through the staid flatlands of Illinois no longer meant as much as it once had.

He remembered the sun rising over the arid mountains near Salt Lake City, shining off the lake and the white salt flats straight into his dazzled eyes. Now that had been scenery worth looking at; he’d carry the picture to his grave with him. Fields and barns and ponds just couldn’t compete, though he wouldn’t have lived in Salt Lake City for Joe DiMaggio’s salary. Well, maybe for DiMaggio’s salary, he thought.

A lot of the Commodores had headed off to the dining car. Across the aisle, Joe Sullivan was staring out the window with the same avidity Yeager had known in his early days. The pitcher’s lips moved as he softly read a Burma Shave sign to himself. That made Yeager smile. Sullivan needed to lather up maybe twice a week.

Suddenly, bright light streamed in through the windows on the pitcher’s side of the car. He craned his neck. “Fu

Mutt Daniels was sitting on that side of the train, too. “Awful damn bright one is right,” the manager said. “Never seen one like that in all my born days. It just keeps hangin’ up there, don’t seem to move a-tall. Kind of pretty, matter of fact.”

The light went from white to yellow to orange to red, fading little by little over several minutes. Yeager thought about getting up and having a look at where it was coming from. He might have done it if Sullivan hadn’t compared it to something you’d see on the Fourth of July. Ever since the Fourth when he broke his ankle, he’d had no use for fireworks. He stuck his nose back into his Astounding.

The rising sun snuck under Heinrich Jager’s eyelids, pried his eyes open. He groaned, shook a few of the cobwebs out of his head, got slowly to his feet. Moving as if every joint in his body were rusty, he got in line for breakfast. More kasha stew, his nose told him. He shrugged. It would keep him full.

“No more lights in the sky?” he asked Ernst Riecke, who looked as tired as he felt.