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The next second, everything went to pieces. Fiore heard the same roaring wail in the sky Yeager had, the same twin blasts. Then the train slammed on the brakes, and then it went off the track. Fiore flew through the air. The side of his head fetched up against the side of a table. A silver light flared behind his eyes before everything spiraled down into darkness.
When he woke up, he thought he’d died and gone to hell. He felt like it; his head pounded like a drum in a swing band, and his vision was blurry and distorted. Blurry or no, the face he saw looked more like a devil than anything else, he could think of. It sure (as hell whispered through his mind) didn’t belong to any human being he’d ever set eyes on.
The thing had sharper teeth, and more of them, than a person had any business having, and a forked tongue like a snake’s to go with them. It also had eyes that reminded him of those he’d seen on a chameleon in the Pittsburgh zoo when he was a kid: each in its own little conical mounting, with one quite capable of looking north while the other looked south.
Remembering the chameleon was the first thing that made Fiore wonder if he truly had ended up in Satan’s country. The devil-or even a devil-should have looked more supernatural and less like a lizard, even an African lizard.
Then he noticed he was still in the flipped dining car, for that matter, he had a butter knife lying on his stomach and a sesameseed roll by one shoe. He was certain hell had to have worse pangs than a dining car, no matter how bad the soup in this one was. Had been, he corrected himself.
The-well, if it wasn’t a devil, it had to be a thing-the thing, then, pointed what looked like a gun at the butter knife near Fiore’s belly button. If he wasn’t in hell at the moment, he realized, he could get there in a hurry. He smiled the smile a dog smiles after it’s lost a fight. “You want to be careful with that,” be said, and hoped he was right.
The thing hissed something in reply. Fourteen years of playing ball all over the United States and with and against players with parents from all over Europe and Latin America left Fiore able to recognize a double handful of languages, and swear in several of them. This wasn’t any he knew, or anything close.
The thing spoke again, and jerked the barrel of the gun. That Fiore understood. He staggered to his feet, wondering as he did so whether his abused head would fall off. The thing made no effort to help him while he swayed. Indeed, it skittered back to make sure he couldn’t reach it.
“If you think I’m bluffing, you’re outta your mind,” he said. It ignored him. Considering that it came up only to the middle of his chest (and he needed shoes to make the five-eight he always claimed), maybe it had reason to be nervous of him, although he doubted he could have squashed a slug if you gave it a running start.
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…
Such thoughts were dangerous. Ludmila knew that, too. The purges of the thirties had swept through Kiev as they had everywhere else in the Soviet Union. One day a teacher would be there, the next day vanished. You learned not to ask where he’d gone, not unless you wanted to join him there.
Ludmila shook her head, as if to drive the worries out of it. She peered down at the ground again, squinted to sharpen her vision as much as she could. That plume of dust there in the distance-she squinted harder. “Yes, those are tanks down at the bottom of it, may the Devil’s grandmother run away with them,” she said.
The Kukuruznik had had a radio fitted when Ludmila went from night harassment to reconnaissance she did not use it. Aircraft that used r
adio around the Lizards generally did not last long afterward; her information, while she thought it important, didn’t seem worth dying for.
She banked away from the Lizards’ base. She wondered if her own base would still be there when she landed. The new invaders, like the old, pounded every airstrip they could find. But the so-called strip had been only a length of smooth steppe, and she could find another such strip at need. The U-2 didn’t need much room in which to set down.
Even when she got to the airstrip, she had to circle twice to be sure it was there. Camouflage nettings and sod roofs disguised the few buildings. A couple of kilometers away stood a strip camouflaged not quite so well. The Lizards had already bombed it twice. That was all right, or better than all right. The planes there were dummies, the buildings repaired every night but uninhabited.
Her teeth clicked together as the Wheatcutter bounced to a halt. Ludmila scrambled down to the ground while the prop was still spinning. The instant it stopped, groundcrew men threw grass-covered nets over the biplane and hauled it away to hide under still more nets which concealed earthen blast barriers.
Ludmila pulled up a corner of, the command shack’s camouflage net, hurried through the doorless entrance, let the net fall behind her. With netting over all the windows, the interior of the shack was gloomy. “I return, Comrade Major,” she announced.
“So you do, Comrade Pilot,” Major Yelena Popova said, returning her salute. “You are most skilled, or most fortunate, or both.” In the space of a sentence, she went from mild greeting to pure business: “Tell me at once what you saw.”
Ludmila obeyed. Major Popova scowled when she mentioned the four new flying towers on the ground. “These-creatures-swarm onto the soil of the rodina-the motherland-like locusts.”
“Yes, Comrade Major, and they consume all before them like locusts, too.” Ludmila described the column of tanks she’d observed.
The squadron commander’s frown, never pleasant, grew downright fearsome. “This is vital information. Those above us must learn of it at once. I shall use the radio. Repeat your statement to me, that I may be sure to report it accurately.”
