In the Balance Read online

  Kirel assumed the stooping posture of respect, a polite way to show he wished to speak. Atvar turned both eyes on him, relieved someone would say at least part of what he thought. The shiplord of the 127th Emperor Hetto said, “Is it certain we can successfully overcome the Tosevites, Fleetlord? Along with radio and radar, they have aircraft of their own, as well as armored fighting vehicles—our probes have shown them clearly.”

  “But these weapons are far inferior to ours of similar types. The probes also show this clearly.” That was Straha, shiplord of the 206th Emperor Yower. He ranked next highest among the shiplords after Kirel, and wanted to surpass him one day.

  Kirel knew of Straha’s ambitions, too. He abandoned the posture of respect to scowl at his rival. “A great many of these weapons are in action, however, and more being manufactured all the time. Our supplies are limited to those we have fetched across the light-years.”

  “Have the Tosevites atomics?” Straha jeered. “If other measures fail, we can batter them into submission.”

  “Thereby reducing the value of the planet to the colonists who will follow us,” Kirel said.

  “What would you have us do?” Straha said. “Boost for home, having accomplished nothing?”

  “It is within the fleetlord’s power,” Kirel said stubbornly.

  He was right; abandoning the invasion was within Atvar’s power. No censure would fall on him if he started back—no official censure. But instead of being remembered through all the ages as Atvar World conqueror, an epithet only two in the long history of the Race had borne before him, he would go down in the annals as Atvar Worldfleer, a title he would be the first to assume, but hardly one he craved.

  His the responsibility. In the end, his choice was no choice. “The awakening and orientation of the troops has proceeded satisfactorily?” he asked the shiplords. He did not need their hisses of assent to know the answer to his question; he had been following computer reports since before the fleet took up orbit around Tosev 3. The Emperor’s weapons and warriors were ready.

  “We proceed,” he said. The shiplords hissed again.

  “Come on, Joe!” Sam Yeager yelled in from left toward his pitcher. “One more to go. You can do it.” I hope, Yeager added to himself.

  On the mound, Joe Sullivan rocked into his motion, wound up, delivered. Some days, Sullivan couldn’t find the plate with a map. What do you expect from a seventeen-year-old kid? Yeager thought. Today, though, the big curve bit the outside corner. The umpire’s right hand came up. A couple of people in the crowd of a couple of hundred cheered.

  Sullivan fired again. The batter, a big left-handed-hitting first baseman named Kobeski, swung late, lifted a lazy fly ball to left. “Shit!” he said loudly, and threw down his bat in disgust. Yeager drifted back a few steps. The ball smacked his glove; his other hand instantly covered it. He trotted in toward the visitors’ dugout. So did the rest of the Decatur Commodores.

  “Final score, Decatur 4, Madison 2,” the announcer said over a scratchy, tinny microphone. “Winner, Sullivan. Loser, Kovacs. The Springfield Brownies start a series with the Blues here at Breese Stephens Field tomorrow. Game time will be noon. Hope to see you then.”

  As soon as he got into the dugout, Yeager pulled a pack of Camels from the hip pocket of his wool flannel uniform. He lit up, sucked in a deep drag, blew out a contented cloud of smoke. “That’s the way to do it, Joe,” he called to Sullivan, who was ahead of him in the tunnel that led to the visitors’ locker room. “Keep the ball down and away from a big ox like Kobeski and he’ll never put one over that short right field they have here.”

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks, Sam,” the winning pitcher said over his shoulder. He took off his cap, wiped his sweaty forehead with a sleeve. Then he started unbuttoning his shirt.

  Yeager stared at Sullivan’s back, slowly shook his head in wonder. The kid hadn’t even known what he was up to; he’d just. happened to do the right thing. He’s only seventeen, the left fielder reminded himself again. Most of the Commodores were just like Joe, kids too young for the draft. They made Yeager feel even older than the thirty-five years he actually carried.

  His “locker” was a nail driven into the wall. He sat down on a milking stool in front of it, began to peel off his uniform.

  Bobby Fiore landed heavily on the stool beside him. The second baseman was a veteran, too, and Yeager’s roommate. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said with a grimace.

  “You’re what? Two years younger than I am?” Yeager said. “I guess so. Something like that.” Fiore’s dark, heavily bearded face, full of angles and shadows, was made to be a mask of gloom. It also made him a perfect contrast to Yeager, whose blond, ruddy features shouted farmboy! to the world. Gloomy now, Fiore went on, “What the hell’s the use of playing in a lousy Class B league when you’re as old as we are? You still think you’re gonna be a big leaguer, Sam?”

  “The war goes on long enough, who can say? They may draft everybody ahead of me, and they don’t want to give me a rifle. I tried volunteering six months ago, right after Pearl Harbor.”

  “You got store-bought teeth, for Christ’s sake,” Fiore said.

  “Doesn’t mean I can’t eat, or shoot, either,” Yeager said. He’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. His teeth, weakened by fever, rotted in his head and came out over the next few years; he’d worn full upper and lower plates since before he started shaving. Ironically, the only teeth of his own he had now were his four wisdom teeth, the ones that gave everyone else trouble. They’d come in fine, long after the rest were gone.

  Fiore just snorted and walked naked to the shower. Yeager followed. He washed quickly; the shower was cold. It could have been worse, he thought as he toweled himself dry. A couple of Three-I League parks didn’t even have showers for the visiting team. Walking back to the hotel in a sticky, smelly uniform was a pleasure of bush-league ball he could do without

  He tossed his uniform into a canvas duffel bag, along with his spikes and glove. As he started getting into his street clothes, he picked up the conversation with Fiore: “What am I supposed to do, Bobby, quit? I’ve been going too long for that. Besides, I don’t know a lot besides playing ball.”

  “What do you need to know to get a job at a defense plant that pays better’n this?” Fiore asked. But he was slinging his jock into his duffel bag, too.

  “Why don’t you, if you’re so fed up?” Yeager said.

  Fiore grunted. “Ask me on a day when I didn’t get any hits. Today I went two for four.” He slung the blue bag over his shoulder, picked his, way out of the crowded locker room.

  Yeager went with him. The cop at the players’ entrance tipped his cap to them as they walked past; by his white mustache, he might have tried volunteering for the Spanish-American War.

  Both ballplayers took a long, deep breath at the same time. They smiled at each other. The air was sweet with the smell of the rolls and bread baking at Gardner’s Bakery across the street from the park. Fiore said, “I got a cousin who runs a little bakery in Pittsburgh. His place don’t smell half as good as this.”

  “Next time I’m in Pittsburgh, I’ll tell your cousin you said that,” Yeager said.

  “You ain’t going to Pittsburgh, or any other big-league town, not even if the war goes on till 1955,” Fiore retorted. “What’s the best league you ever played in?”

  “I put in half a season for Birmingham in 1933,” Yeager said. “The Southern Association’s Class A-1 ball. Broke my ankle the second game of a Fourth of July doubleheader and I was out for the rest of the year.” He knew he’d lost a step, maybe a step and a half, when he came back the next season. He also knew any real chance he’d had of making the majors had snapped along with the bone in his ankle.

  “You’re ahead of me after all. I put in three weeks at Albany—the Eastern League’s Class A—but when I made three errors in one game they shipped me right on out of there. Bastards.” Fiore spoke the word without much heat. If you screwed up, a
nother ballplayer was always ready to grab your place. Anybody who didn’t understand that had no business playing the game for money.

  Yeager stopped at a newsstand around the corner from the hotel and bought a magazine. “Something to look at on the train back to Decatur,” he said, handing the fellow at the stand a quarter. The year before, he would have got a nickel back. Now he didn’t. When you got a Three-I league salary, every nickel counted. He didn’t think going from digest size up to bedsheet was worth the extra five cents.

  Fiore’s lip curled at his choice of reading matter. “How can you stand that Buck Rogers stuff?”

  “I like it.” Yeager hung onto the new Astounding. He added, “Ten years ago, who would have believed the blitz or aircraft carriers or tanks? They were talking about all that kind of stuff in here then.”

  “Yeah, well, I wish they’d been wrong,” Fiore said, to which Yeager had no good reply.

  They came into the hotel lobby a couple of minutes later. The desk clerk had a radio on to catch the afternoon news. H.V. Kaltenborn’s rich, authoritative voice told of fighting in North Africa near Gazala, of fighting in Russia south of Kharkov, of an American landing on the island of Espfritu Santo in the New Hebrides.

  Yeager gathered Espfritu Santo lay somewhere in the South Pacific. He had no idea just where. He couldn’t have found Gazala or Kharcov without a big atlas and patience, either. The war had a way of throwing up name after name he’d never learned about in school.

  Kaltenborn went on, “Daring Czech patriots have struck at the Reichsprotektor for occupied Bohemia, Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich, in Prague. They say they have slain him. German radio blames the assault on the ‘treacherous British,’ and maintains Heydrich still lives. Time will tell.”

  “Nice to hear we’re movin’ forward somewhere, even if I can’t pronounce the name of the place,” Yeager said.

  “Means ‘Holy Spirit,’” Fiore told him. “Must be Spanish, but it sounds enough like Italian for me to understand it.”

  “Okay,” Yeager said, glad to be enlightened. He walked over to the stairs, Fiore trailing after him. The elevator man sneered at them. That always made Yeager feel like a cheapskate, but he was too used to the feeling to let it worry him much. For that matter, the hotel was cheap, too, with a single bathroom down at the end of the hall on each floor.

  He used the room key, tossed his duffel onto the bed, picked up suitcases and tossed them beside the duffel, started transferring clothes from the duffel and the closet to the bags as automatically as he hit the cutoff man on a throw from the outfield. If he’d thought about what he was doing, he would have taken twice as long for a worse job. But after half a lifetime checking out of small-town hotels, where was the need for thought?

  On the other bed, Fiore was packing with the same effortless skill. They finished within a few seconds of each other, closed their bags, and hauled them downstairs. They were the first ones back to the lobby; for most of their teammates, packing didn’t come so easy yet.

  “Another road trip done,” Yeager said. “Wonder how many miles on the train I’ve put in over the years.”

  “I dunno,” Fiore answered. “But if I found a secondhand car with that many miles on it, I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it.”

  “You go to the devil.” But Yeager had to laugh. A secondhand car with that many miles on it probably wouldn’t even run.

  The rest of the Commodores straggled down by ones and twos. A few came over to shoot the breeze, but most formed their own, bigger group; the bonds of youth were stronger than those of the team. That saddened Yeager, but he understood it Back when he started playing pro ball in the long-dead days of 1925, he hadn’t dared go up to the veterans either. The war only made things worse by taking away just about everybody between him and Fiore on the one hand and the kids on the other.

  The manager, Pete Daniels (universally called “Mutt”), settled accounts with the desk clerk, then turned to his troops and declared, “Come on, boys, we got us a five o’clock train to catch:” His drawl was as thick and sticky as the Mississippi mud he’d grown up farming. He’d caught for part of two seasons with the Cardinals thirty years before, back in the days when they were always near the bottom of the pack, and then a long time in the minors.

  Yeager wondered if Mutt still dreamed of a big-league manager’s job. He’d never had the nerve to ask, but he doubted it: the war hadn’t opened those slots. Most likely, Daniels was here because he didn’t know anything better to do. It gave the two of them something in common.

  “Well, let’s go,” Daniels said as soon as the clerk presented him with a receipt. He marched out onto the street, a parade of one. The Decatur Commodores tromped after him. The year before, they would have piled into three or four taxis and gone to the station that way. But with gas and tires in short supply, taxis might as well have been swept off the street. The ballplayers waited on the corner for the crosstown bus, then plopped their nickels into the fare box as they climbed aboard.

  The bus rolled west down Washington Avenue. At the intersections with north-south streets, Yeager could see water looking either way; Madison sat on a narrow neck of land between lakes Mendota and Monona. The bus went around Capitol Park before returning to Washington to get to the Illinois Central station. The capitol itself, a granite-domed white marble building in the shape of a Greek cross, dominated the low skyline of the city.

  The bus stopped right in front of the station. Mutt Daniels waved train tickets. He’d kept track of things in a four-city swing through Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin; now the Commodores would spend the next month back at Fan’s Field, so he’d only have to worry about lineups for a while.

  A colored porter wheeled up a baggage cart. He tipped his cap, grinned to show off a mouthful of gold teeth. “Heah you go, gentlemen,” he said, his accent even richer than the manager’s. Yeager let the fellow heave his bags onto the cart, tipped him a nickel. The gleaming grin got wider.

  Sitting beside Yeager in the passenger car, Fiore said, “When my dad first got to New York from the old country, he took the train from there to Pittsburgh, where my uncle Joe already was. First smoke he’s ever seen in his life is the steward, and he’s got gold teeth just like the porter here. For months, my, dad thought all colored folks came that way.”

  Yeager laughed, then said, “Hell, I grew up between Lincoln and Omaha, and I never saw anybody who wasn’t white till I went off-to play ball. I’ve barnstormed against colored teams a couple of times, make some extra money during the winter. Some of those boys, if they were white, they could play anywhere.”

  “That’s probably true,” Fiore said. “But they ain’t white.” The train started to roll. Fiore twisted in his seat, trying to get comfortable. “I’m gonna sleep for a while, then head back to the dining car after the crowd thins out.”

  “If you aren’t awake by eight, I’ll give you a shot in the ribs,” Yeager said. Fiore nodded with his eyes closed. He was good at sleeping on trains, better than Yeager, who got out his Astounding and started to read. The newest Heinlein serial had ended the month before, but stories by Asimov, Robert Moore Williams, del Rey, Hubbard, and Clement were plenty to keep him entertained. In minutes, he was millions of miles and thousands of years from the mundane reality of an Illinois Central train rolling south over flat prairie fields between one Midwestern town and another.

  A field kitchen rolled up to the tank company somewhere south of Kharkov. After a couple of weeks of motoring this way and that, first to halt a Russian attack and then to trap the attackers, Major Heinrich Jäger couldn’t have said where he was more precisely than that without a call to Sixteenth Panzer’s signal detachment.

  The field kitchen didn’t properly belong to the company. Like the other two units that made up the Second Panzer Regiment, it had a motorized kitchen that was supposed to stay with it, while this one was horse-drawn. Jäger didn’t care. He waved the driver to a halt, shouted to rout out his tank crews.

  Som
e of the men kept on sleeping, in their Panzer IIIs or under them. But the magic word “food” and the savory smell that wafted from the stew kettle got a good many up and moving. “What have you got for us?” Jäger asked the driver and the cook.

  “Boiled kasha, sir, with onions and meat,” the cook answered.

  Jäger had never tasted buckwheat groats till the panzer division smashed its way into southern Russia the July before. They still weren’t his top choice, or anywhere close to it, but they filled the belly nicely. He knew better than to ask about the meat—horse, donkey, maybe dog? He didn’t want to know. Had it been beef or mutton, the cook would have bragged about it.

  He dug out his mess tin, got in line. The cook ladled out a big dollop of steaming stew. He attacked it with gusto. His stomach complained for a moment; it wasn’t used to taking on a heavy load in the wee small hours. Then it decided it liked being full, and shut up.

  Somewhere off in the distance, a machine gun started chattering, and a few seconds later another one. A frown twisted Jäger’s stubbly face as he ate. The Russians were supposed to have been kaput around these parts for most of a week. But then, nobody lived to grow old by counting Russians out too soon. The previous winter had proved that.

  As if drawn by a magnet, Jäger peered through the darkness toward the hulk of a T-34 that sat, turret all askew, perhaps fifty meters away. The killed tank was only a vague shape in the darkness, but even a glimpse could make fearful sweat start under his arms.

  “If only we had panzers like that,” he murmured. He stuck his spoon into the stew still on his tin plate, stroked the black ribbon of his wound badge. Thanks to a T-34, he would have a furrow in his calf till the day he died. The rest of the crew of the Panzer III he’d been in at the time hadn’t been so lucky; only one other man had bailed out, and he was back in Germany getting pieced together one operation at a time.