The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  He passes fifty homers early in August. By the end of the month, with the season winding down, he has sixty-four. That means he’s passed Babe Ruth, whose sixty has stood as the major-league mark since 1927. But the record in the minors is sixty-nine. Joe Hauser did it in 1933, and Bob Crues tied it in 1949 playing for Amarillo in the West Texas-New Mexico League. Joe Bauman played with him there a couple of years earlier.

  On the night of September 1, Joe gets close. Real close. The Sweetwater Spudders are in Roswell. Their franchise is spuddering; they moved from Wichita Falls in June. And Joe has a game for the ages. Four homers. A double. Ten RBIs. Oh, yeah. The Rockets win, 15-9.

  Sixty-eight. One to tie the record. Two to bust it wide open. Nobody in history has ever hit seventy, not since Abner Doubleday said “Let there be bases” and there were bases. All of a sudden, Joe’s a big story. Oh, he’s been a big story in Roswell the whole season, and in the other Longhorn League towns, too. But now he’s a story across the whole country. AP lines carry news of what he’s doing from coast to coast. When’s the last time that happened in Roswell?

  Oh. The thing back in ’47, the one people don’t care to talk about. Whenever Joe thinks about that, he shies away from it like a cat that just got a squirt in the face from a water pistol. So he doesn’t think about it much. It’s not as if he hasn’t got other things on his mind.

  The next day, Pat Stasey, the manager, moves him from cleanup to the leadoff spot so he’ll get more chances to hit. But he doesn’t connect on the second. The record sits on his shoulders, heavy as a piano. He hates the flash bulbs going off every time he comes up. It’s not just the local photographers, either. Sports Illustrated has sent a guy to Roswell. So has Life. He is big news, and kind of wishes he weren’t.

  The game on the third, against Midland, is the Rockets’ last one at Park Field. Joe ties the record in the seventh inning. The piano falls off. But if he’s gonna break it, he’ll have to break it on the road. Along with the rest of the guys, he climbs into the bus for the long, hot haul to Big Spring, Texas. The national shutterbugs and reporters bum lifts from the gentlemen of the Fourth Estate who usually cover Longhorn League games. A little convoy rolls east along US 380.

  Not quite knowing why, Joe wonders if he’ll see a Rocket 88 pacing the rickety old bus, but he doesn’t. Is that good news or bad? He’s not even sure it’s news at all.

  Big Spring is bad news. The Broncs won’t pitch to him. Time after time, he has to toss the bat aside and trot down to first base. Even the Big Spring fans boo. The Rockets have nothing else to play for. They won’t win the pennant. Artesia has already clinched it. And that’s where they head next, for a Sunday doubleheader to close out the season.

  Joe played for Artesia for a couple of years before moving up to Roswell ahead of the ’53 season because he could get the Texaco station there. The fans of the NuMexers (they were the Drillers when he played for them) razz him whenever he comes back to town.

  “Whoever made this schedule’s just plain squirrely,” Stasey complains. “Two hundred miles from Roswell to Big Spring, two hundred more from Big Spring back to Artesia. But Artesia’s only forty miles south of Roswell. We shoulda gone there first, then into Texas.”

  “You want things to make sense, you shouldn’t play this game,” says Vallie Eaves, the pitching coach. He’s past forty, but he still goes out on the mound every once in a while. When he was younger, he made it to the bigs—the only Rocket who can say that. He wasn’t very good, but he made it. Stasey and Joe nod.

  Before the game, the Artesia manager walks over to Joe. “I heard what they done to you in Big Spring,” he says, and spits a stream of tobacco juice onto the hard-baked ground. “I think that was chickenshit. We’ll pitch to you. We won’t groove one, but we’ll give you your chance. Fair’s fair.”

  “Obliged,” Joe answers. “That’s white of you.” Would the other manager say the same thing if he didn’t have the pennant sewed up? Not likely! But Joe will take what he can get.

  He happens to notice three little bald guys in fedoras and sunglasses sitting in the grandstand back of first base. They look so strange, he almost points them out to the guys he plays with. Somehow, though, it slips his mind. As a matter of fact, it slips right out his mind. So do they, which is odd, because they’re down by the front. And none of the other Rockets seems to see them at all.

  Joe still feels funny batting leadoff, but whatthehell, whatthehell. Though Artesia hasn’t liked him since he bailed for Roswell, the crowd cheers and stomps when the PA announcer calls his name. That, or something, makes him feel easier as he steps to the plate.

  On the hill for the NuMexers is a Cuban kid, José Galardo. Their manager wasn’t kidding—he pitches to Joe. Joe takes a couple, fouls off a couple. Artesia has a big ballpark. It’s over 350 to right, and the wind blows toward the plate. If Joe breaks the record, he won’t break it with a cheap shot.

  The kid comes in with a fastball on the 2-2 pitch. Joe swings. Nothing sweeter than bat hitting ball squarely. He knows it’s gone before he finishes his follow-through. No, it’s no cheap home run. It’s way the hell out of there.

  “Number seventy!” the PA man yells. Like a man in a dream, Joe rounds the bases. His feet hardly seem to touch the ground. If hitting number sixty-nine was getting the piano off his back, seventy is the piano stool. When his spikes come down on the plate, he’s grinning just like Christmas.

  And it’s just like Christmas another way, too. When you do something special in the Longhorn League, the fans let you know they appreciate it. They shove cash out through the chicken-wire screening that keeps foul line drives from murdering them. Joe walks down the first- and third-base lines, gathering it in.

  He doesn’t count it as he collects, but it’s got to be a month’s pay, maybe more. Certainly more in effect. Because it’s cash, the IRS won’t have to hear about it.

  One of the bills is a C-note. The hand that thrusts it at Joe is very small, and has only four fingers. “Well done, man of the star,” says a strange voice—half growly, half squeaky—that seems to come from inside his head. Joe blinks, like a man trying to awaken from a dream. But the dream is too sweet. He walks on down the line, grabbing more greenbacks. Photographers follow, clicking away. By the time he gets back to the dugout, he doesn’t care about the voice any more. Still a game—no, two games—to play.

  Roswell wins the first one. And the Rockets murder the NuMexers, 17-0, in the nightcap. Joe launches two more in the second game, one off a guy named John Goodell and one off Frank Galardo, who happens to be José’s uncle. That lets the Rockets slide into second, half a game ahead of the Carlsbad Potashers.

  So it’s a busful of happy ballplayers who go back up US 285 to Roswell. Happy reporters and photographers, too—they have their story. And the national guys are doubly happy. They can get the hell out of New Mexico and back to the big city.

  When Joe comes home, Dorothy shows him a fistful of wires. They’re all congratulating him, telling him what a great guy he is. That’s nice, sure. Then he shows her all the money the Artesia fans gave him. That’s way nicer.

  More wires the next morning. By then, he’s back at Joe Bauman’s Texaco, pumping gas. Almost the first thing that happens when he gets there is a Rocket 88 Olds pulls up to the pump. In it are…a guy with greasy hair and kind of a cute redhead. They congratulate him, too. They were at the game when he hit his sixty-ninth. He fills the Olds’s tank. He takes their money and makes change. He feels disappointed, and can’t say why.

  * * *

  He hopes something big will come from his record, but it doesn’t. No major-league team cares about an old first baseman who hit a ton and a half of homers in the low minors. The San Francisco Seals from the PCL call, but that doesn’t pan out, either. He plays two more years for Roswell, then hangs ’em up for good. Pumping gas, fixing cars…yeah, you can make a lifetime living at that. And he does.

  He always wonders if he could have hacked it. Anyb
ody good enough to play the game for money does. Joe has better reason than most. If he’d done some things differently back in the forties…. Too late now.

  Years go by. That thing people in Roswell didn’t talk about? Some folks decide they can make money off it. Before long, people sell funny-looking aliens with big eyes in every gift shop, every drug store, every 7-Eleven. Even in gas stations.

  Joe won’t sell them. The first time he sees one, he studies it for a second, then shakes his head. “Nah,” he says. “They don’t look quite like that.”

  “Oh, yeah? And how do you know?” asks the poker buddy he’s with—they’re on a beer run.

  He has no idea. “I just know, that’s all,” he says. The poker buddy gives him the horselaugh. He takes it. What else can he do? But, the rest of his days, he never laughs at a flying-saucer joke. Never once.

  Copyright © 2009 Harry Turtledove

  Books by Harry Turtledove

  GERIN THE FOX

  Were Blood

  Werenight

  Prince of the North

  King of the North

  Fox and Empire

  VIDESSOS

  The Misplaced Legion

  An Emperor for the Legion

  The Legion of Videssos

  Swords of the Legion

  Videssos Cycle (omnibus)

  Bridge of the Separator

  KRISPOS

  Krispos Rising

  Krispos of Videssos

  Krispos the Emperor

  WORLDWAR

  In the Balance

  Tilting the Balance

  Upsetting the Balance

  Striking the Balance

  TIME OF TROUBLES

  The Stolen Throne

  Hammer and Anvil

  The Thousand Cities

  Videssos Besieged

  GREAT WAR

  How Few Remain

  The American Front

  Walk in Hell

  Breakthroughs

  DARKNESS

  Into the Darkness

  Darkness Descending

  Through the Darkness

  Rulers of the Darkness

  Jaws of Darkness

  Out of the Darkness

  COLONISATION

  Second Contact

  Down to Earth

  Aftershocks

  WAR BETWEEN THE PROVINCES

  Sentry Peak

  Marching Through Peachtree

  Advance and Retreat

  AMERICAN EMPIRE

  Blood and Iron

  The Center Cannot Hold

  The Victorious Opposition

  CROSSTIME TRAFFIC

  Gunpowder Empire

  Curious Notions

  In High Places

  The Disunited States of America

  The Gladiator

  The Valley-Westside War

  SETTLING ACCOUNTS

  Return Engagement

  Drive to the East

  The Grapple

  In At the Death

  Pacific War

  Days of Infamy

  End of the Beginning

  Gap

  Beyond the Gap

  The Breath of God

  The Golden Shrine

  Atlantis

  Opening Atlantis

  The United States of Atlantis

  Liberating Atlantis

  War That Came Early

  Hitler's War

  West and East

  The Big Switch

  Novels

  Agent of Byzantium

  Noninterference

  A Different Flesh

  Kaleidoscope

  A World of Difference

  Earthgrip

  The Guns of the South

  The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

  The Two Georges: The Novel of an Alternate America (with Richard Dreyfuss)

  Thessalonica

  Between the Rivers

  Household Gods (with Judith Tarr)

  Wisdom of the Fox: The Man Who Wouldn't Be King (As If He Had a Choice)

  Tale of the Fox

  Ruled Britannia

  Conan of Venarium

  In the Presence of Mine Enemies

  Homeward Bound

  Every Inch a King

  Fort Pillow

  The Man with the Iron Heart

  After the Downfall

  Give Me Back My Legions!

  Collections

  Departures

  Down in the Bottomlands: And Other Places (with L Sprague de Camp)

  Counting Up, Counting Down

  Reincarnations

  Forty, Counting Down & Twenty-One, Counting Up

  Atlantis and Other Places

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  Puffing slightly, Henry Louis Mencken paused outside of George’s Restaurant. He’d walked a little more than a mile from the red-brick house on Hollins Street to the corner of Eutaw and Lombard. Along with masonry, walking was the only kind of exercise he cared for. Tennis and golf and other so-called diversions were to him nothing but a waste of time. He wished his wind were better, but he’d turned sixty the summer before. He carried more weight than he had as a younger man. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. At his age, who could hope for better than that?

  He chuckled as his gloved hand fell toward the latch. Every tavern in Baltimore seemed to style itself a restaurant. Maybe that was the Germanic influence. A proud German himself, Mencken wouldn’t have been surprised.

  His breath smoked. It was cold out here this February afternoon. The chuckle cut off abruptly. Because he was a proud German, he’d severed his ties with the Sunpapers a couple of weeks before, just as he had back in 1915. Like Wilson a generation before him, Roosevelt II was bound and determined to bring the United States into a stupid war on England’s side. Mencken had spent his working life taking swipes at idiots in America. Somehow, they always ended up running the country just when you most wished they wouldn’t.

  The odors of beer and hot meat and tobacco smoke greeted him when he stepped inside. Mencken nodded happily as he pulled a cigar from an inside pocket of his overcoat and got it going. You could walk into a tavern in Berlin or Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco and it would smell the same way. Some things didn’t, and shouldn’t, change.

  “Hey, buddy! How ya doin’?” called the big man behind the bar. He had to go six-two, maybe six-three, and at least two hundred fifty pounds. He had a moon face, a wide mouth, a broad, flat nose, and a thick shock of dark brown hair just starting to go gray: he was about fifteen years younger than the journalist. He never remembered Mencken’s name, though Mencken was a regular. But, as far as Mencken could see, the big man never remembered anybody’s name.

  “I’m fine, George. How are you?” Mencken answered, settling himself on a stool. He took off the gloves, stuck them in his pocket, and then shed the overcoat.

  “Who, me? I’m okay. What’ll it be today?” George said.

  “Let me have a glass of Blatz, why don’t you?”

  “Comin’ up.” George worked the tap left-handed. He was a southpaw in most things, though Mencken had noticed that he wrote with his right hand. He slid the glass across the bar. “Here y’go.”

  Mencken gave him a quarter. “Much obliged, publican.”

  “Publican?” George shook his head. “You got me wrong, pal. I voted for FDR all three times.”

  Mencken had v
oted for Roosevelt II once, and regretted it ever after. But if arguing politics with a bartender wasn’t a waste of time, he didn’t know what would be. He sipped the beer, sucking foam from his upper lip as he set the glass down.

  Halfway along the bar, two cops were working on beers of their own and demolishing big plates of braised short ribs. One of them was saying, “So the dumb S.O.B tried to run away from me, y’know? I got him in the back of the head with my espantoon”—he patted the billy club on his belt—“and after that he didn’t feel like runnin’ no more.”

  “That’s how you do it,” the other policeman agreed. “You gotta fill out all kindsa papers if you shoot somebody, but not if you give him the old espantoon. It’s just part of a day’s work, like.”

  Hearing the familiar Baltimore word made Mencken smile. He took a longer pull from his glass, then raised his eyes to the big plaque on the wall behind the bar. Mounted on it were a baseball, a bat, and a small, old-fashioned glove. He caught the bartender’s eye and pointed to the bat. “There’s your espantoon, eh, George?”

  “Damn straight,” George said proudly. Then he raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Never heard before you was a baseball fan.”

  He might not remember Mencken’s name, but he knew who he was. “I used to be, back in the Nineties,” Mencken answered. “I could give you chapter and verse—hell’s bells, I could give you word and syllable—about the old Orioles. Do you know, the very first thing I ever had in print was a poem about how ratty and faded the 1894 pennant looked by 1896. The very first thing, in the Baltimore American.”

  “Them was the National League Orioles,” George said. “Not the International League Orioles, like I played for.”

  “Yes, I know.” Mencken didn’t tell the bartender that for the past thirty years and more he’d found baseball a dismal game. He did add, “Everybody in Baltimore knows for whom George Ruth played.” As any native would have, he pronounced the city’s name Baltm’r.

  And he told the truth. People in Baltimore did recall their hometown hero. No doubt baseball aficionados in places like Syracuse and Jersey City and even Kansas City remembered his name, too. He’d played in the high minors for many years, mostly for the Orioles, and done splendidly both as a pitcher and as a part-time outfielder and first baseman.