In the Balance (14 page)

Yeager shook the proffered hand, then introduced himself. So did the fellow behind him, a bald, muscular man named Otto Chase. He said, “I was just heading to the cement works in Dixon when they blew up in front of me. That’s when I got this here.” He gingerly touched a gash on the top of his head with a blunt forefinger.

At last Yeager stood before Sergeant Schneider. The sergeant paused to sharpen his pencil with a pocket knife, then took Yeager’s name and date of birth. “Married?” he asked.

“No, sir. Divorced,” Yeager said, and made a sour face. Louise had finally gotten sick of his nomadic ways, and when he wouldn’t settle down—

“Children?”

“No, sir,” he said again.

Schneider made a checkmark, then said, “Occupation?”

“Ballplayer,” he answered, which made Schneider look up from the form. He went on, “I play—played, I guess—for the Decatur Commodores. That’s my manager over there.” He pointed to Mutt Daniels, who’d already gone through his line and was jawing with several other First World War veterans.

The recruiting sergeant rubbed his chin. “What position you play? You a pitcher?”

“No, sir. Outfield—left, mostly.”

“Hmm. You throw pretty good, though?”

“Yes, sir. Nothing wrong with my arm,” Yeager said without false modesty. He wasn’t fast, he wasn’t the best fielder in the world, he was a sucker for a slow curve on the outside corner (or, worse yet, just off it), but by God he could throw.

“Okay,” Schneider said. “You’ll be able to chuck a grenade farther than most, I expect.” He scribbled a note, then pointed in Mutt’s direction himself. “You go over with those fellows. We’ve got some grenades and we’ll be bringing more in—if the Lizards don’t shoot up the trucks, anyhow. Go on, now.” The sergeant raised his voice. “Next.”

Rather hesitantly, Yeager walked over to the knot of men with Daniels. He was a rookie on this team; these men, many of them plump or balding or gray, had seen and done things he hadn’t. Suddenly what they knew was in demand again. His own taste of combat had been solely on the receiving end, running away from death in the sky like the hordes of bombed-out refugees in Europe.

Mutt helped some by introducing him around. One of the plump gray men there, a fellow named Fred Walters, turned out, to have played a few weeks of Class D ball back around 1912. “I couldn’t cut the mustard, and they turned me loose,” he said. “You been makin’ a living at it seventeen years? That’s pretty fine.” His admiration also helped make Sam feel more at ease.

And, of course, they all had the war—or rather the wars—to talk about. “With the Lizards here are we still fighting the Germans and the Japs?” Yeager asked, adding, “But for Roosevelt’s speech, I haven’t heard much in the way of news till I got here yesterday.”

“Me neither.” Mutt Daniels ran a hand over his ragged pants and filthy jacket. “We been on the move the last few days, you might say.”

That got him a few wry chuckles. Several of the men standing there were a lot more bedraggled than he was. Fred Walters, by contrast, was clean and well-creased; he lived in Ashton. He said, “Fact of it is, nobody really knows what the hell is going on. I did hear tell, though, that a Jap fleet heading for Hawaii hightailed it back to the Land of the Rising Sun when the Lizards bombed Tokyo.”

“They hit Tokyo,” Yeager said. “First good thing I heard about ’em.”

“They hit Berlin, too,” Walters said, “and a lot of other places besides.”

“One thing this does,” said somebody whose name Yeager hadn’t caught, “is shoot Lend-Lease right in the head. With the damned Lizards right here in the middle of the United States, we don’t have enough for ourselves, let alone for anybody else.”

“Gonna be hard on the Limies and the Russians,” Daniels observed.

“We gotta worry about ourselves first,” the other man said. Heads bobbed up and down, Yeager’s among them. The fellow went on, “Plain fact is, we’re short, too. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be going through this folderol of separating out the ones who know how to fight to make sure they get guns first.”

“Sergeant Schneider over there as much as told me we don’t have enough guns for all the men who’re joining up here,” Yeager said.

“Plain fact is, gentlemen, we got trouble,” Daniels said. “That’s what the plain fact is, and nothing else but.” Heads bobbed up and down again.

* * 

Something moving swiftly through the air—Alarm coursed through David Goldfarb as he caught the motion. He whipped his binoculars up to his eyes, took a longer look, relaxed. “Only a sea gull,” he said, relief in his voice.

“Which kind?” Jerome Jones asked with interest. The events of the past few days had turned him into an avid bird-watcher.

“One of the black-headed ones,” Goldfarb answered indifferently; his interest in birds began and ended with poultry.

He sat in a rickety folding chair of canvas and wood a few feet from the edge of the cliffs of Dover, where England dropped straight down into the sea. An observer might have sat thus a quarter of a century before, with the self-same binoculars, maybe even in the self-same folding chair, peering toward Europe in hope of spotting zeppelins. Only the field telephone by the chair was of a model impossible in 1917.

Jerome Jones laughed when he said that aloud. “Likely is the same folding chair; the forms for a new one won’t have got to the proper office yet.” He laughed again, this time mirthlessly. “Like the bloody Pixie Reports.”

“I told you the flaw wasn’t in the radar,” Goldfarb said.

“That you did—and if you keep up with ‘I told you so,’ you’ll make some nice girl very unhappy one day,” Jones retorted. “Besides, don’t you wish you’d been wrong?”

Having taken two solid hits in as many sentences, Goldfarb answered only with a grunt. His eyes traveled back to what had been the radar station that had superseded observers armed with nothing better than field glasses. Nothing there now but rubble and a faint stench, as of meat gone bad. The only reason Goldfarb could sit out here looking at those ruins was that he’d been off duty when the Lizard rockets struck home.

Up and down the English coast, the story was the same: wherever there’d been an active radar, a rocket came along and took it out. That meant only one thing: rockets able to home in on radar beams, even the new shortwave ones Jerry still hadn’t figured out.

“Who’d have thought the Lizards could be so much smarter than the Germans?” Goldfarb said; no matter how much he loathed Hitler and the Nazis, he had a solid respect for the technical ability of the enemy across the Channel.

“Wireless says we knocked down a couple of their planes over London,” Jones remarked hopefully.

“Good,” Goldfarb said; any news of that sort was encouraging. “How many did we lose?”

“The commentator did not announce the full score of the match,” Jones said. “Military security, don’t you know?”

“Oh indeed,” Goldfarb said. “I wonder if their batsman made his century; no doubt it’s a cricket score set against one footballers might make. God help us all.”

“They’ve not tried a landing here,” Jones said, still looking on the bright side.

“It’s only a very small island.” Goldfarb pictured a world globe in his mind, and realized all at once just how small England had to look from space.

Not small enough to keep them from bombing us Jones said bitterly. He and Goldfarb both shook their heads. They’d helped their country beat back the most savage air assault the world had ever known, then helped start paying the Germans back. Now they were under attack again. It hardly seemed fair.

“There’s something!” Goldfarb exclaimed, pointing. He and Jones both swung their field glasses toward, the moving specks in the sky. The specks—even through binoculars, they were little more than that—were southbound. “Ours, I think,” Goldfarb said, “bound for the Lizards’ lair in France.”

“Lizards and Frogs.” Jones laughed at his own wit, but quickly sobered. “I wonder how many of the poor brave buggers’ll fly back north again after their run. Worse than the flak over Berlin, they say.”

“I wonder if Jerry’s hitting back at the Lizards, too.” Something else occurred to Goldfarb. “If his planes and ours are both trying to hit them at the same time, do we shoot at each other, too?”

“I hope not,” Jones exclaimed. “Wouldn’t that be a balls-up?”

“It would indeed,” Goldfarb said. “I hope not, too.” He laughed, not altogether comfortably. “First time in donkey’s years I’ve wished the Germans anything but a fast trip to the devil.”

“The Germans, they’re human beings. Stack ’em against things from Mars and I know where my choice lies,” Jones said.

Goldfarb answered with a grunt. He was reluctant to concede anything to the Nazis; he agreed completely with Churchill’s quip that, should Satan declare war on Hitler, he would at least give the Devil a favorable mention in the House of Commons. But quips came easy. Now the whole world faced devils it didn’t know. Britain had allied with Red Russia when Germany invaded: Germany was worse. If the Lizards were worse than Germany, would alliances swing again?

He scowled. “I’m damned if I want to see us in bed with the Nazis.” He wondered again at the fate of his cousins in Poland.

“Would you rather end up in bed with the Lizards?” Jones demanded. Before it could turn into an argument, he added, “Me, I’d rather end up in bed with the barmaid down at the White Horse Inn.”

That sufficed to distract Goldfarb. “Which one?” he asked. “Daphne or Sylvia?”

“Daphne by choice. I’m rather keen on blondes, and she has more to hold on to.” Jones’s hands illustrated just which parts he had in mind. “But,
of course, were Sylvia to smile at me in exactly the proper fashion—redheads are interesting because they’re unusual, what?”

“They both fancy pilots,” Goldfarb said morosely. Along with, no doubt, a great many other nonflying RAF men, he’d had his advances turned into retreats by both girls. For that matter, so had Jerome Jones.

The other radar man said, “Now there’s something to say for the Lizards, at any rate.” Goldfarb raised an interrogative eyebrow. Jones explained: “if they keep on as they’ve been doing, we’ll soon have no pilots left.”

“That’s not funny,” Goldfarb said. As if to contradict himself, he started laughing.

Then he choked on his laughter. Something screamed past overhead at just above treetop height. He grabbed for the field telephone, cranked as if his life depended on it while more Lizard planes streaked northwest above him. He shouted out his warning over the yowl of their engines.

“If it’s London again, the bastards will be there in a minute,” Jones yelled at the top of his lungs. He might as well have been whispering; Goldfarb had to read his lips.

Goldfarb did his best to sound hopeful: “Doesn’t take long to scramble the Spitfire squadrons.”

“Maybe not, but we can’t catch their planes even if we do manage to get ours up.”

“What’s worked best is loitering alongside, their return routes, then striking at them as they go past.”

“Dogging and pouncing,” Jones said, dropping his voice as the Lizard aircraft receded in the distance. Goldfarb raised that eyebrow again. His friend went on, “I did a bit of history at Cambridge along with the maths. The old Byzantines would let the Arabs into Asia Minor, you see, then wait at the passes for them to come out with their loot.”

“Ah,” Goldfarb said. “And did it work?”

“Sometimes. But even when it did, of course, Asia Minor took a bit of a hiding.”

“Yes. Well, we’ve had hidings before. I hope we can ride out another one,” Goldfarb said. “Not that we’ve much choice in the matter.”

Neither of them said much after that. Goldfarb dug a finger into one ear, trying to make it stop ringing. He had little luck—the Lizards’ engines were just too loud. He wondered if the RAF was having any luck, and wished he could be up in a Spitfire himself. His abilities didn’t lie there, though. He consoled himself with the thought that he’d done what he could by spotting the flight of bombers.

He peered south, out over the English Channel. The springtime air—almost summer now, he reminded himself—was sweet and mild and clear.
The French coast was a low, dark smear on the horizon. He raised the binoculars to his eyes. France leapt closer. Three years ago, that coast had been England’s shield. Then, horribly, unexpectedly, the shield fell over, and it served as a base for a thrust at England’s heart.

And now—what? Another thrust at England’s heart, but one at Germany’s as well. Goldfarb wished the Lizards would leave his country alone and go after the Nazis with everything they had. The wish changed the situation about as much as wishes commonly do.

He sighed. “It’s a rum world, sure enough.”

“Aye, it is.” Jones looked at his watch. “Our reliefs should be here any minute now. When we’re off, shall we head over to the White Horse? What they call best bitter’s gone to the dogs since the war (gone through their kidneys, by the taste of it), but there’s always Daphne to stare at, maybe even to chat, up.”

“Why not?” Goldfarb intended to try Sylvia again—his own taste ran to redheads. She wasn’t a Jewish girl to bring home to his family (he’d thought a lot more about that since the war started), but he didn’t aim to marry her—however attractive some of the concomitants of that relationship might be.

He laughed at himself. The next interest in him Sylvia showed would be her first.
Well
, he thought,
she can’t very well show interest if I’m not there to be interesting
.

“Something else to thank the Lizards for,” Jones said. “If they hadn’t smashed up the radar set, we’d be spending all these idle hours fiddling with it instead of chasing skirt. Radar’s all very well, but next to skirt—”

“Right,” Goldfarb said. He pointed. “And here come Reg and Steven, so let’s be off.”

As Jones got up from his canvas chair, he asked, “Can you lend me ten bob?”

Goldfarb stared at him. He grinned back, cheekily confident. Goldfarb got out his wallet, passed over a note. “If you had the gall with Daphne that you do with me …”

“With ten bob in my pocket, maybe I will.”

“Come on, then.” There was a war on—there were, these last few crazed days,
two
wars on—but life went on, too. Goldfarb hurried through his report to the next watch crew, then hurried off with Jerome Jones toward the White Horse Inn.