In the Balance

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.

3

The Kukuruznik’s engine complained about the thin air it was breathing; at four thousand meters, it was way over its proper cruising altitude-up near its ceiling, as a matter of fact. Ludmila Gorbunova’s lungs complained, too. The little biplane was not equipped with oxygen, and even sitting in the cockpit made her feel as if she’d just finished a twenty-kilometer run.

She would have gone higher if she could, though. At such a height, the U-2 was hardly more than a speck in the sky-but the Lizards were proving even more skilled than the fascists at spotting such specks and knocking them down.

Ludmila did not even try to fly directly over the new invaders’ base. Planes that did that quite simply never came back. The base, a giant ringworm on the smooth skin of the steppe, was visible enough even at the greater distance an oblique view gave.

She counted the huge flying towers that formed the perimeter of the base, shook her head, counted them again. She still got twenty-seven. That was four more than she’d spotted on her last flight, the day before yesterday. From four thousand meters, most things on the ground looked tiny as ants. The towers, though, still bulked large, their shadows darkening great strips of grassland.

They were large, too; from them poured the impossibly deadly planes and tanks that were wresting great tracts of land not only from the. Russians who owned it but from the Germans as well Ludmila still did not know how to feel about that. She hated the Germans with all her soul, but against them one could contend with hope of victory. How could mere men fight the Lizards and their marvels?

Mere men kept trying. Even now, if the radio was to be believed, Soviet tank columns were engaging the Lizards’ armor and pushing, it back in disarray. Ludmila wondered if anyone believed the radio any more. The year before, the radio had said the Germans were being pushed back from Minsk, then from Kiev, then from Smolensk…