In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Read online

  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 eart
hquake 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 hov
ering 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.”