In the Balance

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 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 running start.