In the Balance

“Holy Jesus God, it’s the Gerps shootin’ us up!” the manager shouted. He hadn’t known whether to say Germans or Japs, and came out with both at once.

Through the railing of the little platform between cars, Yeager watched the airplane-whosever it was-flash past overhead. It went by so fast, it was just an unidentifiable streak in the sky. The roar of its engines beat at him, faded… then began to grow again.

“It’s coming back,” he said. With all the screaming and yelling up and down the length of the train, that should have come out as a bellow Instead, it was hardly more than a whisper, as if the louder he said it, the more likely it was to be true.

He said it loud enough to convince Mutt Daniels. The manager paused to stick his head back into the passenger car and yell, “Y’all better git out while y’can!” Then he took his own advice and jumped off the train. His shoes scraped on the graveled roadbed, then clumped more quietly as he reached the soft dirt of the fields.

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 wa

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 go

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 spi

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.”