In the Balance

2

Hunger crackled like fire in Moishe Russie’s belly. He’d thought lean times and High Holy Days fasts had taught him what hunger meant, but they’d no more prepared him for the Warsaw ghetto than a picture of a lake taught a man to swim.

Long black coat flapping about him like a moving piece of the night, he scurried from one patch of deep shadow to the next. It was long past curfew, which had begun at nine. If a German saw him, he would live only so long as he still amused his tormentor. Fear dilated his nostrils at every breath, made him suck in great draughts of the fetid ghetto air.

But hunger drove harder than fear-and after all, he could become the object of a German’s sport at any hour of the day or night, for any reason or none. Only four days before, the Nazis had fallen on the Jews who came to the Leszno Street courthouse to pay their taxes-taxes the Nazis themselves imposed. They robbed the Jews not only of what they claimed was owed, but also of anything else they happened to have on their persons. With the robbery came blows and kicks, as if to remind the Jews in whose clawed grip they lay.

“Not that I needed reminding,” Russie whispered aloud. He was a native of Wolynska Street, and had been in the ghetto since Warsaw surrendered to the Germans. Not many had lasted through two and a half years of hell.

He wondered how much longer he would last. He’d been a medical student before September 1939; he could diagnose his own symptoms easily enough. Loose teeth and tender gums warned of the onset of scurvy; poor night vision meant vitamin A deficiency. The diarrhea could have had a dozen fathers. And starvation needed no doctor to give it a name. The hundreds of thousands of Jews packed into four square kilometers had all too intimate an acquaintance with it.

The one advantage of being so thin was that his coat went round him nearly twice. He’d liked it better when it was a proper fit.

His furtive movements became, even more cautious as he, drew near the wall. The red bricks went up twice as high as a man, with barbed wire strung above them to keep the boldest adventurer from climbing over. However much he wanted to, Russie did not aim to try that. Instead, he whirled the sack he carried around and. around like an Olympic hammer-thrower, then flung it toward the Polish side of the wall.

The sack flew up and over. Heart pounding, Russie listened to it land. He had padded the silver candlestick with rags, so it bit with a soft, dull thump instead of a clatter. He strained to catch the sound of footfalls on the other side. He was at the Pole’s mercy now. If the fellow simply wanted to steal the candlestick, he could. If he had hope of more, he’d keep the bargain they’d made in Leszno Street.

Waiting stretched like the lengths of wire on the wall and had as many spikes. Try as he would, Russie could hear nothing from the other side. Maybe the Germans had arrested the Pole. Then the precious candlestick would lie abandoned till some passerby came upon it… and Russie would have squandered one of his last remaining resources for nothing.

A soft plop on the cobblestones not far away. Russie sprinted over. The rags that bound up the tattered remnants of his shoes made hardly a sound. He held his hat on with one hand; as he grew thinner, even his head seemed to have shrunk.

He snatched up the bag, dashed back toward darkness. Even as he ran, the rich, intoxicating odor of meat flooded his senses, made his mouth gush with saliva. He fumbled at the drawstring, reached inside. His spidery fingers closed round the chunk, gauged its size and weight. Not the half a kilo he’d been promised, but not far from it. He’d expected the Pole to cheat worse: what recourse did a Jew have? Perhaps he could complain to the SS. Sick and starving though he was, the thought raised black laughter in him.

He drew out his hand, licked the salt and fat that clung to it. Water filled his eyes as well as his mouth. His wife, Rivka, and their son, Reuven (and, incidentally, himself), might live a little longer. Too late for their little Sarah, too late for his wife’s parents and his own father. But the three of them might go on.

He smacked his lips. Part of the sweetness on his tongue came from the meat’s being spoiled (but only slightly; he’d eaten far worse), the rest because it was pork. The rabbis in the ghetto had long since relaxed the prohibitions against forbidden food, but Russie still felt guilty every time it passed his lips. Some Jews chose to starve sooner than break the Law. Had he been alone in the ghetto, Russie might have followed that way. But while he had others to care for, he would live if he could. He’d talk it over with God when he got the chance.

How best to use the meat? he wondered. Soup was the only answer: it would last for several days, that way, and make rotten potatoes and moldy cabbage tolerable (only a tiny part of him remembered the dim dead days before the war, when he would have turned aside in scorn from rotten potatoes and moldy cabbage instead of wolfing them down and wishing for more).

He reached into a coat pocket. Now his spit-wet fist closed on a wad of zlotys, enough to bribe a Jewish policeman if he had to. The banknotes were good for little else; mere money was rarely enough to buy food, not in the ghetto.

“I have to get back,” he reminded himself under his breath. If he was not at his sewing machine in the factory fifteen minutes after curfew lifted, some other scrawny Jew would praise God for having the chance to take his place. And if he was there but too worn to meet his quota of German uniform trousers, he would not keep his sewing machine long. His narrow, clever hands were made for taking a pulse or removing an appendix, but their agility with bobbin and cloth was what kept him and part of his family alive.

He wondered how long he would be allowed to maintain even the hellish life he led. He did not so much fear the random murder that stalked the ghetto on German jackboots. But just that day, whispers had slithered from bench to bench at the factory. The Lublin ghetto, they said, had ceased to be: thousands of Jews taken away and-Everyone filled in his own and, according to his nightmares.

Russie’s and was something like a meat-packing plant, with people going through instead of cattle. He prayed that he was wrong, that God would never allow such an abomination. But too many prayers had fallen on deaf ears, too many Jews lay dead on sidewalks until at last, like cordwood, they were piled up and hauled away.

“Lord of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” he murmured softly, “I beg You, give, me a sign that You have not forsaken Your chosen people.”

Like tens of thousands of his fellow sufferers, he sent up that prayer at all hours of the day and night, sent it up because it was the only thing he could do to affect his horrid fate.

“I beg You, Lord,” he murmured again, “give me a sign.”

All at once, noon came to the Warsaw ghetto in the middle of the night. Moishe Russie stared in disbelieving wonder, at the sun-hot point of light blazing in the still-black sky. Parachute flare, he thought, remembering the German bombardment of his city.

But it was no flare. Whatever it was, it was bigger and brighter than any flare, by itself lighting the whole of the ghetto-maybe the whole of Warsaw, or the whole of Poland-bright as day. It hung unmoving in the sky, as no flare could. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the point of light became a smudge, began to fade from eye-searing, actinic violet to white and yellow and orange. The brilliance of noon gave way little by little to sunset and then to twilight. The two or three startled birds that burst into song fell silent again, as if embarrassed at being fooled.”

Their sweet notes were in any case all but drowned by the cries from the ghetto and beyond, cries of wonder and fear. Russie heard German voices with fear in them. He had not heard German voices with fear in them since the Nazis forced the Jews into the ghetto. He had not imagined he could hear such voices. Somehow that made them all the sweeter.

Tears poured from his dazzled eyes, ran down his dirty, hollow cheeks into the curls of his beard. He sagged against a torn poster that said Piwo. He wondered how long it had been since beer came into the ghetto.

But none of that mattered, not in any real sense of the word. He had asked God for a sign, and God gave him one. He did not know how he could pay God back, but he promised to spend the rest of his life finding out.

Fleetlord Atvar stood before the holographic projection of Tosev 3. As he watched, points of light blinked into being here and there above the world’s ridiculously small landmasses. He wondered if, once Tosev 3 came under the dominion of the Race, manipulation of plate tectonics might bring up more usable territory.

That was a question for the future, though, for five hundred years hence, or five thousand, or twenty-five thousand. Eventually, when everything was decided and planned down to the last detail, the Race would act. That way had served it well for centuries piled on centuries.

Atvar was uneasily aware he lacked the luxury of time. Herd expected to enjoy it, but the Tosevites, having somehow developed with indecent haste the rudiments of an industrial civilization, posed a greater challenge to his forces than he or anyone else back Home had anticipated. If he failed to meet the challenge, only his failure would be remembered.

Accordingly, it was with some concern that he turned to Shiplord Kirel and said, “These devices were properly placed?”

“It is so, Fleetlord,” Kirel replied. “All placing vessels report success and have returned safely to the fleet; instruments confirm proper targeting of the thermonuclear devices and their simultaneous ignition above the principal radio communications centers of Tosev 3.”

“Excellent.” Atvar knew the Tosevites had no way to reach even a fraction of the altitude of the placing vessels. Nevertheless, actually hearing that matters had proceeded as designed was always a relief. “Their systems should be thoroughly scrambled, then.”

“As the exalted fleetlord says,” Kirel agreed. “Better still, many parts of those systems should be permanently destroyed. Unshielded transistors and microprocessors are extremely vulnerable to electromagnetic pulse and, since the Tosevites have no nuclear power of their own, they will never have seen the necessity for shielding.”

“Excellent,” Atvar repeated. “Our own shielded aircraft, meanwhile, should have rare sport against them while they writhe like roadscuttlers with fractured vertebrae. We should have no problem clearing areas for landing, and once our troops are on the ground, conquest becomes inevitable.” Saying the words brought fresh confidence to the commander. Nothing reassured the Race more than a plan that was going well.

Kirel said, “May it please the exalted fleetlord, as we land, shall we broadcast demands for surrender to be picked up by whatever receivers remain intact down below?”

That was not part of the plan as formulated. Of course, the plan as formulated went back in its essentials to the days when no one thought the Tosevites had any technology worth mentioning. Nevertheless, Atvar felt an almost instinctive reluctance to deviate from it. He said, “No, let them come to us. They will surrender soon enough when they feel the weight of our metal.”

“It shall be done as the fleetlord wishes,” Kirel said formally. Atvar knew the shiplord had ambition of his own, and that Kirel would make careful note of any and all mistakes and failures, especially those he had argued against. Let Kirel do as he would. Atvar felt sure this was no mistake.

Flight Leader Teerts stared in disbelieving wonder at the head-Up display reflected against the inside of his windshield. Never in training had he imagined sorties in such a target-rich environment. The great herd of Tosevite aircraft crawled along below and ahead of him, blissfully unaware he was so much as in their solar system.

The voice of one of the other two pilots in the flight rang in the audio button taped to his hearing diaphragm: “Pity we have no more killers to assign to this area. They’d enjoy themselves.”

Before he answered, Teerts checked the radio frequency. As ordered, it wasn’t one the Tosevites used. Relaxing, he answered, “We’re taking on an entire world, Rolvar; we don’t have enough killers to knock down all the native junk at once. We’ll just have to do the best we can with what we have.”

That best gave every sign of being spectacular. All six of his missiles had already selected targets from the herd. He ripple-fired them, one after another. His killercraft bucked slightly under him as the missiles dropped away. Their motors kicked in and spat orange flame; they sprinted downward toward the ungainly Tosevite flying machines.

Even had the locals known they were under attack, they could have done little, not when his missiles had ten times the speed of their aircraft. The head-up display showed his salvo and those of his wingmates streaking home. Then, suddenly, Teerts needed no head-up, display to gauge what was happening: gouts of fire suddenly filled, the darkness below as aircraft tumbled out of the sky.

Rolvar yowled in Teerts’ audio button. “Look at them fall! Every shot a clean hit!”

Killercraft pilots were chosen for aggressiveness. Teerts had won flight-leader paint because he also kept track of details. After a glance at the display, he said, “I show only seventeen kills. Either a missile was defective or two’ went after the same target.”

“Who cares?” said Gefron, the other member of the flight. Gefron would not make flight leader if he lived to be a thousand, even counting by double-length Tosevite years. He was a good pilot, though. He went on, “We still have our cannon. Let’s use them.”

“Right.” Teerts led the flight down into gun range. The natives still didn’t know what had happened to them, but they knew something horrible had. Like a flock of frenni beset by wild botor, they were scattering, doing their feeble best to get out of harm’s way. Teerts’ jaws opened in mirth. Their best would not suffice.

His engines changed pitch as they breathed thicker alt Servos squealed, adjusting the sweep of his wings. His speed dropped to little more than that of sound. A target filled his windshield. He stabbed the firing button with the thumbclaw of his stick hand. The nose of his plane disappeared for a moment in the glare of the muzzle blast. When his vision cleared, the Tosevite aircraft, one wing sheared away, was already spinning out of control toward the ground.

He’d never been among so many aircraft in his life. He bled off still more speed, to avoid collision. Another target, another burst, another kill. A few moments later, another and another.

Off to one side, he saw brief spurts of flame. He turned one eye that way. A Tosevite aircraft was shooting back at him. He abstractly admired the natives’ courage. Once pacified, they would serve the Race well. They weren’t even bad pilots, given the limitations of the lumbering aircraft they flew. They were maneuvering with everything they had, trying to break contact and escape. But that was his choice, not theirs.

He shot out the front of the aircraft pack, began to circle back toward it for another run. As he did so, a flash on the head-up display made him slew both eyes toward it. Somewhere out there in the night, a native aircraft with better performance than those of the herd was turning in his direction and away from it.

An escorting killercraft? An enemy who thought him a better target? Teerts neither knew nor cared. Whoever the native was, he’d pay for his presumption.

Teerts’ cannon was radar-controlled. He fired a burst. Flames sprang from the Tosevite killercraft. At the same moment, it shot back at him. The shells fell short. The native, all afire now, plunged out of the sky.

Teerts raked the stampeding herd of aircraft twice more before his ammunition ran low. Rolvar and Gefron had also done all the damage they could. They streaked for low orbital pickup; soon enough, the Race would have landing strips on the ground. Then the slaughter of Tosevite aircraft would be great indeed.

“Easy as a female in the middle of her season,” Gefron exulted.

“They’re brave enough, though,” Rolvar said. “A couple of their killercraft came right for me; I might even have a hole or two. I’m not so sure I got both of them,’ either; they’re so little and slow, they’re a lot more maneuverable than I am.”

“I know I got mine,” Teerts said. “We’ll snatch some sleep and then come down and do it again.” His flightmates hissed approval.

One second, the Lancaster below and to the right of George Bagnall’s was flying along serenely as you please. The next, it exploded in midair. For a moment, Bagnall saw men and pieces of machine hang suspended, as if on strings from heaven. Then they were gone.

“Jesus!” he said fervently. “I think the whole ruddy world’s gone mad. First that great light in the sky-”

“Lit us up like a milliard star shells all at once, didn’t it?” Ken Embry agreed. “I wonder how the devil Jerry managed that? If it had stayed lit much longer, every bloody Nazi fighter in the world would have been able to spy us up here.”

Another Lane blew up, not far away. “What was that?” Bagnall demanded. “Anybody see a Jerry plane?”

None of the gunners answered. Neither did the bomb-aimer. Embry spoke to the radioman: “Any better luck there, Ted?”

“Not a bit of it,” Edward Lane answered. “Ever since that light, I’m getting nothing but hash on every frequency.”

“Bloody balls-up, that’s what it is,” Embry said. As if to italicize his words, two more bombers went up in flames. His voice rose to near a scream: “What’s doing that? It’s not flak and it’s not planes, so what the hell is it?”

Next to the pilot, Bagnall shivered in his seat. Flying missions over Germany was frightening enough in and of itself, but when Lanes started getting blown out of the sky for no reason at all… His heart shrank to a small, frozen lump in his chest. His head turned this way and that, trying to see what the devil was murdering his friends. Beyond the polished Perspex, the night remained inscrutable.

Then the big, heavy Lancaster shook in the air for an instant like a leaf on a rippling stream. Even through the growl of the plane’s four Merlins, he heard a shrieking roar that made every hair on his body try to stand erect. A lean shark-shape swept past, impossibly swift, impossibly graceful. Two huge exhausts glared like the red eyes of a beast of prey. One gunner had enough presence of mind to fire at it, but it vanished ahead of the Lane in the blink of an eye.

“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, sunny features allowed. He was a physicist, damn it, not a carpenter. What hurt worse than his maimed digit was the snickers from the young punks who made up most of the work crew that was building strange things in the west stands of Stagg Field.

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 running outside to see.

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 running back the way he had come. He dodged past dozens of people who were still just standing and gawking. “Where’s the fire, buddy?” one of them yelled.

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. “Funny thing in the sky,” he reported. “Looks like a Fourth of July firework, but it’s an awful damn bright one.”

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.

“No, sir,” the captain answered. “I don’t know if I should have bothered you, but-”

“You did the right thing,” Jager said, mentally adding, even if it did cost me another hour in my blanket. “I don’t know what the devil that was. It looked like one of our recognition flares, but it was a million times as big and bright. And it didn’t fall, either. It stayed in one place till it went out. I wonder what it was.”

“One of Ivan’s tricks, maybe,” Riecke suggested.

“Maybe,” But Jager didn’t believe it. “If it was, though, he should have followed it up. No bombers, no artillery… If the Russians were trying something, it didn’t work.”

Like the rest of the tankmen, Jager gulped down his stew. When everyone was fed, he reluctantly sent the field kitchen on its way. He hated to part with it, but it wouldn’t be able to keep up with the tanks.

One after another, the Panzer IIIs rumbled into life. The whole company let out a cheer when the motor of the twelfth tank caught. Jager shouted as loud as anybody. He didn’t think they’d be facing enemy armor today, but you never could tell in Russia. And if not today, then one day before too long.

He clambered up into the turret of the tank he personally commanded, radioed division headquarters to see if orders had changed since yesterday. “No, we still want you to shift to map square B-9,” the signal lieutenant answered. “How do you read my transmission, by the way?”

“Well enough,” Jager said. “Why?”

“We had some trouble earlier,” the signalman answered. “After that explosion in the sky, reception went into the toilet for a while. Glad it didn’t trouble you.”

“Me, too,” Jager said. “Out.” He unfolded his map, studied it. If he was where he thought he was, he and his panzers needed to make about twenty kilometers to get to where they were supposed to be. He leaned down into the crew compartment of the tank, called to the driver. “Let’s go. East.”

“East it is.” Dieter Schmidt put the Panzer III into gear. The roar of the Maybach HL12OTR engine changed pitch. The tank began to roll ahead, chewing two lines through the grass and dirt of the steppe. The engine went up the scale and down, up and down, as Schmidt worked his way through the six forward speeds of the gearbox.

The dustbin cupola at the back of the turret gave a decent view even when closed down. Like any tank commander worth his black coveralls, Jager left it open and stood up in it whenever he could. Not only could he see more than even through good periscopes, the air was fresher and cooler and the racket less-or at least different. He traded being surrounded by engine rumble for the iron clash and rattle of the spare wheels and tracks lashed to the tank’s rear deck.

He frowned a little. If the German logistics train were better run, he wouldn’t have had to carry his own spares to make sure they were there when he needed them. But the eastern front ran more than three thousand kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Expecting the high foreheads who were out of harm’s way to care what happened to any one tank commander was too much to hope for.

The panzers rolled through the detritus of battle, past graves hastily dug in the rich dark soil of the Ukraine; past stinking, bloated Russian corpses still unburied; past wrecked trucks and tanks of both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. German engineers swarmed over those like flies over the corpses, salvaging whatever they could.

The gently rolling country stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. Not even war’s wounds scarred it too Severely. Sometimes when Jager looked out across that sea of green, his dozen tanks seemed all alone. He grinned when, off in the distance, he spied a German infantry company.

Once or twice, planes buzzed by overhead. That made him grin more widely. Somewhere east of Izyum, Ivan was going to catch hell.

A noise like the end of the world-the panzer a couple of hundred meters to his right went up in a fireball. One second it was there, the next nothing but red and yellow flame and a column of black, greasy smoke mounting to the sky. A moment later came the barks of secondary explosions as the tank’s ammunition began going off. The five-man crew couldn’t have known what hit them. Jager told himself that, anyhow, as he dove down inside the turret.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Georg Schultz. The gunner had heard the blast through thick steel and through the racket of his own tank’s motor.

“Joachim’s tank just went up,” Jager answered “Must have bit: a mine-but the Ivans aren’t supposed to have laid any mines around here.” His voice showed his doubt, the explosion had been very violent for a mine. Maybe if the blast went up into the gas tank, the captain thought. No sooner had the idea crossed his mind then another panzer went up with an even louder detonation than the first.

“Jesus!” Schultz shouted. He stared fearfully at the metal floor of the tank, as if wondering when a white-hot jet of flame would burst through it.

Jager grabbed for the radio that linked him with the rest of the company, hit the all-hands frequency. “All halt!” he bawled. “We’re hitting mines.” He shouted the order forward to Dieter Schmidt, then stood up in the cupola to make sure it was being obeyed.

The ten surviving tanks of the company did stop. The rest of the commanders bounced up just like Jager, each of them trying to see what was going on. But for two blazing hulks, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Jager was about to call divisional headquarters to ask for a sapper detachment when a lance of fire tore across the sky and blew the turret clean off one of the stopped panzers. The oily chassis promptly began to burn.

Cursing his own mistake, Jager let himself fall back into the turret. He grabbed the radio, screamed, “Get moving! They’re rockets from the air, not mines! The Ivans must have found some way to mount Kasyushas on their ground-attack planes. If we stay where we are, we’re sitting ducks.” He didn’t need to relay the order to Schmidt this time; his Panzer III was already lurching ahead, the engine roaring flat out.

Only as the captain went up into the cupola again did he consciously realize the trail of fire in the sky had come from the west, from behind him. “Turn the turret around!” he yelled, and cursed the hydraulics as the heavy dome of metal ever so slowly began to traverse. A couple of the other commanders had been more alert. Their tanks’ turrets were already slewing to the rear.

Jager turned that way himself. As he did so, a fourth panzer was hit in the engine compartment. Flames began to spurt. Turret doors flew open; men started bailing out. One, two, three… commander, gunner, loader. Fire washed over the whole tank. The driver and hull gunner never had a chance.

The company commander frantically scanned the sky. Where was the Stormovik, the armored Russian attack plane that was likeliest to be carrying Katyusha rockets? His heart leapt when he spotted a flying shape. The coaxial 7.92mm machine guns of the company’s faster-reacting panzers spat flame at it. They weren’t likely to hurt it, but might keep the pilot from making a low firing run.

They didn’t. Here he came. Jager got ready to throw himself behind the turret’s armor the instant the Stormovik’s guns started shooting back. Then, as the plane drew swiftly nearer, he noticed it wasn’t a Stormovik. And when it fired, its whole blunt nose went yellow-white with the muzzle blast. Dust fountained around two more panzers. Both of them stopped dead. Smoke poured from them. Along with the reek of flaming gas and oil and cordite, Jager’s nose caught the roast-pork stink of burning human flesh.

The airplane passed overhead, almost close enough to touch. In spite of everything, Jager stared at it in disbelief. It was almost the size of a medium bomber, and had no propeller he could see. It bore neither the German cross and swastika nor the Soviet star; in fact, it bore no device at all on its camouflaged wings and body. And it did not roar like every other airplane he had ever known-it shrieked, as if its motive power came from damned souls.

Then it was gone, vanishing into the east more swiftly than any fighter Jager knew. He gaped after it, mouth fallen open in most unofficerlike fashion. One pass, and half his company was flaming wreckage.

Like his own, Ernst Riecke’s panzer had survived the onslaught. It came rattling over. Riecke was standing up in his cupola. The captain’s face bore the same expression of stunned disbelief Jager knew his own did. “What-” Riecke had to try twice before he could get the words out. “What the devil was that?”

“I don’t know.” Jager found an even worse question: “What if it comes back?”

The Japanese were looting the village. They’d already shot a couple of people for protesting when their possessions were hauled away. The bodies lay as mute warnings in the square beside the ruined wall of the yamen. As if they did not suffice, the invading soldiers swaggered around with fixed bayonets, ready to spit anyone who gave them so much as a hard look.

Liu Han had done her best to make herself invisible to the Japanese. She knew how they recruited their pleasure battalions. Ashes grayed her hair, charcoal added not just filth but also lines to her face, giving her the look of a. much older woman. Grief made it easy for her to assume the stooped posture of the elderly. She wandered aimlessly around the edges of the village, in part to keep away from the soldiers, in part because, with home and family gone, she had nothing better to do.

Because she kept away from the noisy chaos that engulfed invaders and townsfolk alike, she might have been the first to hear the thuttering in the air. Her head came up in fright-more bombers on the way? But surely not, not when the village already lay under the Japanese boot.

Or could they be Chinese planes? If the Kuomintang government wanted to hold Hankow, it would need to fight back with everything it had. And the noise was growing from the south! Fear and excitement warred within Liu Han. She wanted the Japanese dead, but did she wish to die with them?

In spite of her anguish, she decided she wanted to live. Stoop forgotten, she ran for the woods-the farther from the village when bombs began to fall, the better. The drone of approaching aircraft swelled in her ears.

She threw herself down in a tangle of bushes and ferns. By then the planes were almost overhead. She, stared up at them through tree branches. Despite anguish and terror, her eyes went wide. The planes she was used to had graceful, birdlike bodies. These flying-things-looked more like dragonflies. They were angular, awkward-seeming, with landing gear projecting from their bodies like insect legs. And they had no wings! If anything save magic kept them in the air, it was the whirling disk above each of them.

They hovered in midair like dragonflies, too. Liu Han had never heard of an airplane that could do such a thing, but then, all she knew of airplanes was the death and devastation they brought.

There these dragonfly planes proved no exception. As they hung in the sky, they fired machine guns and rockets into Liu Han’s poor bleeding village. Screams pierced the rattle of gun-fire and the crash of explosions. So did the deep, harsh cries of the Japanese soldiers. Liu shuddered to hear them; they reminded her of the baying of wolves. Seeing the invaders lashed with such pitiless fire almost made her forget the ruination, of her village.

Then a machine gun began to chatter inside the ruins of the yamen. The Japanese were doing their best to fight back. Tracer bullets drew fiery lines up toward the dragonfly planes. Two rockets snarled groundward. A roar, a flash of light, and the machine gun fell silent. Forgetting she was supposed to be in hiding, Liu Han let out a delighted screech. With chaos all around who was likely to hear one more screech?

A couple of dragonfly planes settled toward the ground, floating through the air as light as windborne snow. Doors opened in their sides as they touched down. Liu Han saw motion inside them. Holding her breath, she waited for soldiers to leap out and finish slaughtering the Japanese.

Could they really be men of the Kuomintang? Liu Han hadn’t imagined that her country boasted such marvelous airplanes. Maybe they came from America! The Americans were supposed to be the most clever of all the foreign devils when it came to machines-and they were fighting the Japanese, too. Liu Han had seen an American once, a big, fat Christian missionary who spoke bad Chinese. He’d sounded very fierce, she remembered. She imagined big, fierce American soldiers springing out of the, dragonfly planes, each with a sparkling bayonet half as long as he was tall. She hugged herself with glee at the delicious thought.

Helmeted soldiers began springing out of the dragonfly plane. They were not big, fierce Americans. They were not Chinese troops, either. Liu Han’s glee turned to horror in the space of a single breath. The Chinese commonly called foreigners “devils”; just a moment before, Liu Han had been thinking about American devils. But here were devils in truth!

They were shorter than people, and skinnier. Their green-brown hides glistened in the afternoon sun like snakeskin. They had no noses; instead, the bottom parts of their faces were pulled out in short muzzles-Liu Han thought first of cats, then of lizards. The devils had tails, too, short blunt ones that hung a third of the way down to their knees. Liu Han rubbed her eyes, hard, but when she opened them again, the devils were still there. She moaned, deep in her throat.

The devils did not move like people, either. Liu Han thought of lizards again; the devils’ motion had something of that same loose-joined skitter to it. And when they were still, they were absolutely still, in a way no human save a meditating monk could match.

They did not act like monks. They had things that looked like guns in their hands. The things were guns-they started firing into the village. And what guns! Instead of the bang, bang, bang of ordinary rifles, the devils’ weapons spat streams of bullets like machine guns.

Despite their barrage, despite the rockets and gunfire from the dragonfly planes, Japanese soldiers in the village kept shooting. The devils on the ground advanced against the invaders, some rushing forward while others covered them. Had she been attacked by such monsters, Liu Han knew she would have either given up at once or fled. The Japanese did neither. They fought on until they were all killed. It did not take long.

By the time the little battle ended, the whole village was on fire. Peering through a screen of brush, Liu Han saw the townsfolk, those who still lived, scattering in all directions save toward her (the dragonfly planes on the ground were a potent argument against running that way).

After a few minutes, a couple of villagers did come toward the dragonfly planes, chivvied along by the devils with guns. One of those devils lay on the grass just outside the houses. The blood that splashed its scaly hide was red as a man’s. Liu Han rubbed her eyes again. She hadn’t thought devils could bleed.

Some of the hovering dragonfly planes flew off to the north. Before long, they began firing again. Good Liu Han thought. They’re killing more Japanese.

With resistance in the’ village-and the village itself-destroyed, the little scaly devils on the ground began prowling about, as if to make sure no more enemies lurked nearby. When one came in her direction, Liu Han frantically tried to bury herself under leaves and branches. If the Amida Buddha was kind, the devil would not see her.

The compassionate Buddha must have been looking somewhere else. The scaly devil yelled something in whatever language devils used among themselves. Liu Han shivered under her makeshift shelter, but did not come out. Then the devil’s gun roared. Bullets snarled through the branches around her.

The devil yelled again. She knew it could have killed her had it cared to, so maybe it was ordering her to give up. She stood up, raised her hands above her head. “P-please don’t shoot me, master devil,” she quavered.

When the devil spoke once more, she saw it had lots of small pointed teeth and a long forked tongue like a lizard’s. One of its eyes kept looking at her. The other, unnervingly, swiveled this way and that. When Liu Han took a step toward the devil, it sprang backward and raised its gun in clear warning.

She realized it barely came to her shoulder. “Are you afraid of me?” she said. The idea of a devil’s knowing fear was so absurd that she wanted to laugh in spite of all the disasters of this dreadful day.

The little scaly devil didn’t act as if it was funny. It gestured with the gun, pointing back toward the dragonfly planes. Some other villagers were already being marched aboard them. Liu Han knew she had no choice but to go in that direction. As she walked past the devil, it stepped back to make sure she didn’t come within arm’s length. If it wasn’t afraid of her, Liu Han couldn’t figure out why it was so cautious.

Before she climbed up the ramp into the dragonfly plane, another devil tied her hands together in front of her. It followed her inside, then motioned her into a seat with its gun.

The seat was uncomfortable, being both the wrong shape for her backside and too small; she had to draw her knees up to her chin to fit her legs into a space that would have been fine for one of the little scaly devils. In the seat beside her sat Yi Min, who looked even more cramped than she felt.

The apothecary looked up dully as she joined him. His face was bloody from a cut by one eye. “So they got you, too, did they?” he said.

“Yes,” Liu Han answered. By village standards, Yi Min was an educated man, so she asked him, “What sort of devils are these? I’ve never seen or heard of anything like them.”

“Neither have I,” he said. “In fact, I hardly believed in devils-I thought they were superstitious rubbish. They-”

The little scaly devil with the gun said something. It put one hand over its muzzle, holding its toothy mouth closed. Then it pointed to Liu Han and Yi Min. After it did that two or three times, she figured out that it didn’t want them to talk. She set a hand over her own mouth. The devil made a noise like a bubbling pot and. sat down. Liu Han decided she’d satisfied it.

The dragonfly plane’s engine began to roar. The blades that sprouted from the top of it started spinning, first slowly, then faster and faster until they looked like one of the flickering disks she’d noticed above the dragonfly planes when she was still out in the woods.

Without warning, the machine climbed into the air. Liu Han’s stomach lurched. She let out a frightened, involuntary squeak. The little scaly devil swung both its turreted eyes toward her. “Sorry, master devil,” she said. It kept on glaring. She realized she’d made a new mistake, clapped a hand to her mouth to try to set it right. The devil made that boiling noise again, let its eyes wander away. Had she room, she would have sagged with relief.

She looked out the little window by Yi Min. Through it she could see, frighteningly far below, the burning ruins of her village. Then the dragonfly plane spun in the, air and flew off, taking her away from everything she had ever known.

The train had just rolled south past Dixon when everything went to hell. Sam Yeager read the last letter in his Astounding, set the magazine down on the seat beside him-Bobby Fiore had woken up and was back in the dining car. Yeager hoped he’d finish soon. He was getting sleepy himself, but how could he doze off when his roommate was going to step over him-or on him-any time now?

Stymied by a complete lack of facts, the Decatur Commodores had given up arguing about, what the light in the sky had been. Several of them were sleeping, some with caps or hats over their eyes to keep out the overhead lights. Yeager yawned, stretched, thought about doing the same thing. Maybe he’d be out by the time Bobby got back.

He’d just decided he would go to sleep when something roared past overhead, so loud it woke up everyone who had been resting. Yeager leaned over and jammed his face against the window, wondering if he’d see an airplane go down in flames. That roar sounded as if it had come from just above the train, and he’d never heard a healthy engine sound anything like it.

Sure enough, a moment later a tremendous bang came from in front of the train, and then another one, even louder. “Jesus,” Yeager said softly. On the other side of the aisle, Joe Sullivan crossed himself.

While Yeager’s head was still ringing from the explosions, the train hit the brakes for all they were worth. He slammed into the seat in front of him. Iron screamed as wheels clenched track. Sparks shot up high enough for him to see them through the window.

The brakes were not worth enough. The passenger car suddenly flipped onto its side. Yeager dropped like a stone, landed on top of Sullivan. The pitcher yelled. Yeager yelled, too, as his head hit what had been the far wall of the car and was now abruptly the floor. His teeth dug into his lip. The hot, metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. He ran his tongue around in there. Luckily, his dentures hadn’t broken.

Through the cries of his teammates and the other people in the car, he listened to the rest of the train derailing. The receding string of crashes and bumps made him think of an earthquake bought on the installment plan.

He tested each limb as he untangled himself from Joe Sullivan. “You all right, kid?” he asked.

“I don’t know. My shoulder-” Sullivan clutched the injured part. His eyes were wide with fear as well as pain-it was his throwing arm.

“I think maybe we’d better get out of here if we can. Come on.” In the darkness, Yeager walked back toward the rear of the car across what had been window frames. Sullivan didn’t follow. Yeager hardly noticed; he was stepping as carefully as he could. Some of the windows were broken, and he didn’t want to slice his leg on jagged glass.

“That you, Sam?” Mutt Daniels asked as he went by. It took more than a derailment to make him sound anything but slow and relaxed.

“Yeah, it’s me.” Yeager listened to the moans, and to one woman who kept letting out little screams every few seconds. “I think we got some hurt people here, Mutt.”

“Reckon you’re right,” the manager said. “How the hell we supposed to put a team together tomorrow when shit like this happens to us?”

“You’re a baseball man, Mutt,” Yeager said. The crash had driven all thoughts of tomorrow’s game out of his head. He decided not to tell Daniels about Joe Sullivan’s shoulder. Poor Mutt would find out soon enough.

The sliding door to the next car back had sprung off its track when the train went sideways. It gaped open. Yeager pulled himself up into the doorway. He sniffed the outside air, didn’t smell smoke. He didn’t see any fire, either. One thing to be thankful for anyway, he thought, especially when a man at the front of the car yelled, “Somebody here hurt his neck bad!”

“Don’t move him,” three people said at once.

Mutt Daniels scrambled up beside Yeager. The manager had a tougher time of it, being both shorter and rounder than his ballplayer. He said, “Wonder what the hell we hit.”

“If it was that plane, there’d be burning.” Yeager cocked his head. That screaming roar was still in the sky, which meant the plane hadn’t crashed after all. But in that case, where had the explosions come from?

The scream got louder, as if the crazy-sounding airplane was coming back. Just when it made Yeager want to scream, too, a new noise joined it, a deep, rapidly repeated bark. The derailed train shook under Yeager and Daniels as shells slammed into it. Glass tinkled. Screams redoubled.

“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 wanna get too close to a big target.”

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 gonna get out in the open till I see the stars painted on their sides. You get shot at from the air once or twice, you plumb lose the taste for it.” The manager squatted, ducked under the corn.

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 spinning disk above it. His mind seized on the hovering gyros in Heinlein’s “If This Goes On-” But what were those flying marvels from a story set far in the future doing in here-and-now Illinois?

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.”

“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.

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.

Running away from somebody-or even something-carrying a machine gun wasn’t smart. So Fiore let himself be herded onto the flying machine and into a too-small seat. A good many of the scaly things joined him, but no people. The machine took off. His stomach gave a lurch different from the one he’d felt when he stepped over the dead steward. He’d never been off the ground before.

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.