Tilting the Balance

After an error on a routine ground ball, a strikeout ended the inning. Yeager tossed his glove to the ground outside the foul line and trotted in to the chicken-wire cage that served for a dugout. He was due to lead off the bottom of the sixth.

He’d walked his first time up and swung at a bad ball the second, hitting a little bleeder that had been an easy out. The pitcher for the other side had a pretty strong arm, but he also thought he was Bob Feller-or maybe getting Yeager the last time had made him cocky. After wasting a curve down and away, he tried to bust Sam in on the fists with a fastball.

It wasn’t fast enough or far enough in. Sam’s eyes lit up as soon as he pulled the trigger. Thwack! When you hit the ball dead square, your hands hardly know it’s met the bat-but the rest of you does, and so does everybody else. The pitcher wheeled through one of those ungainly pirouettes pitchers turn to follow the flight of a long ball.

The ball would have been out of Fan’s Field or any other park in the Three-I League, but the field they were, playing on didn’t have fences. The left fielder and center fielder both chased after the drive. Sam ran like hell. He scored, standing up. His teammates pounded him on the back and slapped him on the butt.

Behind the backstop, Barbara bounced up and down. Beside her, Ullhass and Ristin hissed excitedly. They weren’t about to try going anywhere, not with so many soldiers around.

Yeager sat down on the park bench in the dugout. “Whew!” he said, panting. “I’m getting too old to work that hard.” Somebody found a threadbare towel and fanned him with it, as if he were between rounds in a fight with Joe Louis. “I’m not dead yet,” he exclaimed, and made a grab for it.

He got another hit his next time up, a line single to center stole second, and went to third when the catcher’s throw flew over the shortstop’s head. The next batter picked him up with a ground single between the drawn-in shortstop and third baseman; that was the last run in a 7–3 win.

“You beat them almost singlehanded,” Barbara said when he came around the wire fence to join her and the Lizard POWs.

“I like to play,” he answered. Lowering his voice, he added, “And this isn’t near as tough a game as I’m used to.”

“You certainly made it look easy,” she said.

“Make the plays and it does look easy, like anything else,” he said. “Mess them up and you make people think nobody could ever play it right. God knows I’ve done that often enough, too-otherwise I wouldn’t have been in the bush leagues all those years.”

“How can you hit a round ball with a round stick and have it go so far?” Ristin asked. “It seems impossible.”

“It’s a bat, not a stick,” Yeager answered. “As to how you hit it, it takes practice.” He’d let the Lizards swing at easy tosses a few times. They choked way up on the bat; they were only about the size of ten-year-olds. Even so, they had trouble making contact.

“Come on,” somebody called. “Picnic’s starting.”

It wasn’t a proper picnic, to Yeager’s way of thinking: no fire for wieners, just sandwiches and some beer. But the MPs and air raid wardens would have come down on them like a ton of bricks-if Lizard bombers hadn’t already used the point of flame as a target for some of their explosive goodies.

The sandwiches were tasty: ham and roast beef on home-baked bread. And the Coors brewery was close enough to Denver that even horse-drawn wagons brought enough into town to keep people happy. The beer wasn’t as cold as Sam would have liked, but he’d grown up in the days before iceboxes were universal, and falling back to those days wasn’t too hard for him.

The breeze kicked up as the sun went down. Yeager wouldn’t have minded a fire then, not at all: Denver nights got chilly in a hurry. Ullhass and Ristin felt it worse than he did; they put on the heavy wool sweaters they’d had knotted around their skinny, scaly waists. The sky got dark in a hurry, too, once the sun slipped behind the Rockies. Stars glittered brightly in the midnight-blue bowl of the heavens.

The ballplayers were used to having the Lizard POWs around. One of them pointed up to the points of light in the sky and asked, “Hey, Ristin, which one of those do you come from?”

“It is behind Tosev-your star for this world,” Ristin answered. “You cannot see it now.”

“The Lizards come from the second planet of Tau Ceti,” Yeager said. “They’ve got their hooks on the second planet of Epsilon Eridani and the first planet of Epsilon Indi. We were next on the list.”

“Those are the names of stars?” said the fellow who’d asked Ristin where he was from. “I’ve never heard of any of ’em.”

“I hadn’t, either, not till the Lizards came,” Sam answered. “I grew up on a farm, too-I thought I knew stars like the back of my hand. I knew the Dippers and Orion and the Dogs and the zodiac and things like that, but there’s a lot more sky than I ever figured on. And Epsilon Indi’s like the Southern Cross-too far south to see from here.”

“So what’re these places like?” the man asked.