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Daniels went “over this way,” toward a table manned by a younger man in khaki, a corporal; along with most of the men in the auditorium, Yeager went “over there,” a longer line toward a table behind which Schneider himself sat. He suspected that Mutt and the rest of the veterans would get first crack at whatever rifles became available. That was only fair. They had the best idea of what to do with them.
His own line moved much more slowly. He chatted with the men in front and in back of him. He’d come through the hamlet of Franklin Grove on his way to Ashton, and heard President Roosevelt’s defiant speech “from somewhere in the. United States of America.” “He sure can turn a phrase,” the fellow in front of Yeager said. “ ‘This Earth is ours, this nation is ours. No one shall take them from us, so help me God.’ ”
“That’s just what he said,” Yeager said admiringly. “How’d you remember it right on the button like that?”
“I’m a reporter-it’s a trick of the trade,” the man said. He was in his late twenties, with sharp foxy features, a hairline mustache, very blue eyes, and sandy hair combed down slick and close to his skull. He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Pete Thomsen. I’m with the Rockford Courier-Journal.”
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 interes
t. 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.
