Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“What do you need to know to get a job at a defense plant that pays better’n this?” Fiore asked. But he was slinging his jock into his duffel bag, too.

“Why don’t you, if you’re so fed up?” Yeager said.

Fiore grunted. “Ask me on a day when I didn’t get any hits. Today I went two for four.” He slung the blue bag over his shoulder, picked his, way out of the crowded locker room.

Yeager went with him. The cop at the players’ entrance tipped his cap to them as they walked past; by his white mustache, he might have tried volunteering for the Spanish-American War.

Both ballplayers took a long, deep breath at the same time. They smiled at each other. The air was sweet with the smell of the rolls and bread baking at Gardner’s Bakery across the street’ from the park. Fiore said, “I got a cousin who runs a little bakery in Pittsburgh. His place don’t smell half as good as this.”

“Next time I’m in Pittsburgh, I’ll tell your cousin you said that,” Yeager said.

“You ain’t going to Pittsburgh, or any other big-league town, not even if the war goes on till 1955,” Fiore retorted. “What’s the best league you ever played in?”

“I put in half a season for Birmingham in 1933,” Yeager said. “The Southern Association’s Class A-1 ball. Broke my ankle the second game of a Fourth of July doubleheader and I was out for the rest of the year.” He knew he’d lost a step, maybe a step and a half, when he came back the next season. He also knew any real chance he’d had of making the majors had snapped along with the bone in his ankle.

“You’re ahead of me after all. I put in three weeks at Albany-the Eastern League’s Class A-but when I made three errors in one game they shipped me right on out of there. Bastards.” Fiore spoke the word without much heat. If you screwed up, another ballplayer was always ready to grab your place. Anybody who didn’t understand that had no business playing the game for money.

Yeager stopped at a newsstand around the corner from the hotel and bought a magazine. “Something to look at on the train back to Decatur,” he said, handing the fellow at the stand a quarter. The year before, he would have got a nickel back. Now he didn’t. When you got a Three-I league salary, every nickel counted. He didn’t think going from digest size up to bedsheet was worth the extra five cents.

Fiore’s lip curled at his choice of reading matter. “How can you stand that Buck Rogers stuff?”

“I like it.” Yeager hung onto the new Astounding . He added, “Ten years ago, who would have believed the blitz or aircraft carriers or tanks? They were talking about all that’ kind of stuff in here then.”

“Yeah, well, I wish they’d been wrong,” Fiore said, to which Yeager had no good reply.

They came into the hotel lobby a couple of minutes later. The desk clerk had a radio on to catch the afternoon news. H.V. Kaltenborn’s rich, authoritative voice told of fighting in North Africa near Gazala, of fighting in Russia south of Kharkov, of an American landing on the island of Espfritu Santo in the New Hebrides.

Yeager gathered Espfritu Santo lay somewhere in the South Pacific. He had no idea just where. He couldn’t have found Gazala or Kharcov without a big atlas and patience, either. The war had a way of throwing up name after name he’d never learned about in school.

Kaltenborn went on, “Daring Czech patriots have struck at the Reichsprotektor for occupied Bohemia, Nazi butcher Reinhard Heydrich, in Prague. They say they have slain him. German radio blames the assault on the ‘treacherous British,’ and maintains Heydrich still lives. Time will tell.”

“Nice to hear we’re movin’ forward somewhere, even if I can’t pronounce the name of the place,” Yeager said.

“Means ‘Holy Spirit,’ ” Fiore told him. “Must be Spanish, but it sounds enough like Italian for me to understand it.”

“Okay,” Yeager said, glad to be enlightened. He walked over to the stairs, Fiore trailing after him. The elevator man sneered at them. That always made Yeager feel like a cheapskate, but he was too used to the feeling to let it worry him much. For that matter, the hotel was cheap, too, with a single bathroom down at the end of the hail on each floor.

He used the room key, tossed his duffel onto the bed, picked up suitcases and tossed them beside the duffel, started transferring clothes from the duffel and the closet to the bags as automatically as he hit the cutoff man on a throw from the outfield. If he’d thought about what he was doing, he would have taken twice as long for a worse job. But after half a lifetime checking out of small-town hotels, where was the need for thought?

On the other bed, Fiore was packing with the same effortless skill. They finished within a few seconds of each other, closed their bags, and hauled them downstairs. They were the first ones back to the lobby; for most of their teammates, packing didn’t come so easy yet.

“Another road trip done,” Yeager said. “Wonder how many miles on the train I’ve put in over the years.”

“I dunno,” Fiore answered. “But if I found a secondhand car with that many miles on it, I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it.”

“You go to the devil.” But Yeager had to laugh. A secondhand car with that many miles on it probably wouldn’t even run.

The rest of the Commodores straggled down by ones and twos. A few came over to shoot the breeze, but most formed their own, bigger group; the bonds of youth were stronger than those of the team. That saddened Yeager, but he understood it Back when he started playing pro ball in the long-dead days of 1925, he hadn’t dared go up to the veterans either. The war only made things worse by taking away just about everybody between him and Fiore on the one hand and the kids on the other.

The manager, Pete Daniels (universally called “Mutt”), settled accounts with the desk clerk, then turned to his troops and declared, “Come on, boys, we got us a five o’clock train to catch:” His drawl was as thick and sticky as the Mississippi mud he’d grown up farming. He’d caught for part of two seasons with the Cardinals thirty years before, back in the days when they were always near the bottom of the pack, and then a long time in the minors.

Yeager wondered if Mutt still dreamed of a big-league manager’s job. He’d never had the nerve to ask, but he doubted it: the war hadn’t opened those slots. Most likely, Daniels was here because he didn’t know anything better to do. It gave the two of them something in common.

“Well, let’s go,” Daniels said as soon as the clerk presented him with a receipt. He marched out onto the street, a parade of one. The Decatur Commodores tromped after him. The year before, they would have piled into three or four taxis and gone to the station that way. But with gas and tires in short supply, taxis might as well have been swept off the street. The ballplayers waited on the corner for the crosstown bus, then plopped their nickels into the fare box as they climbed aboard.

The bus rolled west down Washington Avenue. At the intersections with north-south streets, Yeager could see water looking either way; Madison sat on a narrow neck of land between lakes Mendota and Monona. The bus went around Capitol Park before returning to Washington to get to the Illinois Central station. The capitol itself, a granite-domed white marble building in the shape of a Greek cross, dominated the low skyline of the city.

The bus stopped right in front of the station. Mutt Daniels waved train tickets. He’d kept track of things in a four-city swing through Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin; now the Commodores would spend the next month back at Fan’s Field, so he’d only have to worry about lineups for a while.