In the Balance

“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 go

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 sesameseed 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,” be 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 ru

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 flip-flop. 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.

Ru

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.