Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (14 page)

She was wearing a warm coat and had a hat on, a little feather rising from the hat-band. Very snappy. Dad was dressed in a business suit that he didn't look comfortable in. Also with a hat, a nice fedora, getting coated now in the thickening mist. Moe recognized that face from somewhere.

Ollie saw Moe looking his way and waved. Moe nodded back, wishing he hadn't looked. He didn't want to encourage the kid.

But, damnit, he had. Little Ollie started walking Moe's way, tugging his parents along, pal Hughie trailing along behind. Damn. He didn't want them around. In about ten minutes that tractor-trailer with that superbomb hiding under the tarp was going to go right by him and Moe had a job to do. Right here.

Little Ollie and his entourage made it across the road. "Hey, Mr. Berg," he said, "this here's my parents, and they'd like to meet you." He took off his ball cap and pointed at the inside of the front bill. "I showed them this great autograph."

Ollie's mom reached out her gloved hand to shake Moe's. "That was very gracious of you to do that for the boys, Mr. Berg. Thank you so much."

Dad did the same, giving Moe a good, strong handshake. "Yes, Moe—can I call you Moe?—that was very nice, thanks. I watched you play against the Stars a number of times. You always seem to hit our pitching really well," he said, and smiled.

"Sure," Moe said to him, "call me Moe. And thanks, on the hitting." He shrugged. "You know how it goes with hitting, some of them drop in and some of them don't. Just lucky, I guess, against the Stars." Truth was, Moe had no idea how he'd done against the Stars. Damndest thing, to have a history and not know it.

And then it dawned on Moe who this was he was talking to. "You're Marcus Brown, aren't you?" he asked him.

Sure enough, just like she'd said in Oaks Field the last time he'd seen the woman, here was Marcus Brown, right in front of him. The guy he had to keep alive while he was making sure others were dead.

Moe knew the story, had read about it on the train down from Oakland to L.A. Brown had been just another blue-collar guy in Pasadena, looking for work, when the disk first arrived from Corning, and he was hired as an apprentice to help with the long, hard work of polishing that rough mirror down to the perfection it needed to be the greatest telescope the world had ever seen. Over time, he fell in love with the work. His attention to detail and his ability to get totally absorbed in the careful work of polishing pushed him up the ladder in terms of responsibility, and he became, in a few years, the man in charge. The polishing took six years, the work so delicate that once it neared the end Brownie—as he was known—could only polish a small patch of the mirror before the heat generated from that hand-polishing meant quitting for hours or even for the day.

But finally it was done, and now he was here to see his labor rewarded with the installation of that mirror into the great telescope, the Subaru telescope finished with funds from the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Republic of California's new pal in a forced marriage. Japan. The Rising Sun.

Moe guessed Brown planned to bring the wife and son and pal along and walk next to the big rig up the last thousand yards to the top of the mountain and the cranes that would take the mirror from the trailer and drop it gently and neatly into its cradle inside the huge dome of the observatory.

But Moe was there to make sure things went a certain way, and that way wasn't Brownie's. There was a superbomb involved, and an ambitious Mexico that didn't know it was being set up, and a Japanese territory to the north that was in for one or two big surprises, and, of course, the Germans. And Ruggiero, working one side or the other.
And so Moe Berg was going to have to ruin Brownie's day.

It hadn't taken Moe long to realize things weren't going exactly as the woman had said they would. Hell, he'd felt that pulse of nausea another couple of times on the train ride and watched the train's steam locomotive change back to diesel and then back again to steam before he crossed the border at Reno and bought his ticket for the narrow gauge up and over the Donner Pass and down the western slope of the Sierras to Lodi, a boomtown now that Sacramento was in Japanese hands. There he got back on the bigger train and headed over to Oakland, in the Republic of California.

San Francisco was in Japanese hands, but the Californians had hung onto Oakland and now there was peace—of a kind—which was obvious as the train wound its way through the golden hills and down on into Oakland. Moe was on the right side of the train and as they neared the Sixteenth Street Station he could see out his window that great broken bridge heading west over the bay where it ended, eerily, just after Yerba Buena Island. The Japanese had, in two years' time, dismantled their side of the bridge, making a statement about the permanence of the separation between Occupied California and the Republic. Two huge zeppelins, they looked like sister ships to the Hindenburg, but wore the rising sun on their tails, were moving out over the bay. One looked like it was heading toward the Golden Gate, which stood serene and whole in the distance, and the other was coming in to dock somewhere along the San Francisco piers. Were there daily f lights to Japanese-held Hawaii? Probably so, Moe thought. It was a very different war here. Or had been a different war. Too bad.

At the train station twenty minutes later, Moe got out. It was noon, and while he needed to get down to Los Angeles, he needed a break, too. He'd been cooped up on that train for nearly forty hours, and that was enough. And since he had a week to prepare for what he had to do down near the border with Mexico, he might as well spend half a day here.

He looked up at the timetable. There were trains heading down to L.A. every two hours or so right up to the sleeper train at midnight. His ticket was good for all of those, including the first-class sleeper. No beautiful mystery woman to share it with, but what the hell.

So it was lunch, dinner, and some sightseeing in Oakland, getting a feel for how it was living up here right on the border with the Japanese.

It wasn't a big train station, despite having transcontinental trains come in five times a day, so Moe's walk across the tiled f loor of the station was a short one, past the coin-operated storage lockers and then the twin newsstands. The
Chronicle
's stand was empty now since the city across the bay was Occupied Territory and Moe supposed that the stationmaster was keeping it there, empty, as a reminder of the current realities.

Moe walked out through the big glass doors and onto the broad front steps, and stood there for a moment to take in the view: that beautiful bay and there, in the distance, fog-bound Japanese San Francisco. In Oakland the sun was shining.

Moe figured the ballpark was only a couple of miles away and it was a lovely day for a walk, so he headed in that direction, but when he got to San Pablo Avenue an electric trolley pulled in right in front of him that was headed the right way, so he stepped aboard, handed the conductor a nickel and got his ticket in return, and found himself a seat. In three stops—maybe fifteen minutes—he was there, the trolley stop across the street from Oaks Field.

He was unlucky and the Oaks were out of town, but the ballpark was open and he walked in through the turnstile and up the broad central ramp that led to the stands. When he got to the top of the ramp he stopped and looked around in the bright sunshine. In front of him were fifteen or twenty rows of box seats, painted
bright red. Beyond those folded seats was the field, and there were sprinklers going in the outfield, chugging around to spray the grass in big overlapping circles of water. The infieldlooked pretty good, major-league quality; hell, that even looked like Georgia clay out there, though that seemed unlikely. He walked down to the front row, went to his left to get past the screen, and stepped over the low wall to walk onto the field and out toward the batter's box, where he paused for a second, and then took one more step right onto home plate. Both feet firmly planted.

It was all unreal in its normalcy. This was it, home plate, the center of it all, the focal point of baseball. You swing a stick and hit a ball and you run and run until you come home while the other guys try to stop you.

Moe stood on the plate to look around. The field. The green grass, the bases, the perfection and imperfection of every bit of it, from pebbles in the infieldthat cost you a game to the perfection of leaning into a good pitch and watching it soar out over the players, the outfield, the wall, the fans: right out of the ballpark and bouncing down the street from there, not stopping until some lucky kid saw it rolling along and grabbed it and had himself a baseball.

He looked down the lines at first and third. The baselines, faded now on an off day, ran out to infinity. Funny that, the idea that beyond the outfield wall the lines kept going, widening all the time, taking in, ultimately, the whole damn planet.

And to each side of the plate the batter's boxes—messy and faded now before the next home game when they'd be re-sprayed, prettied up, confining the hitter, making him stay in that little box and deal with what the pitcher could deliver.

It had only been a couple of days and already Moe missed the game. He'd thought he'd had enough of it, wouldn't miss it a bit; but the feel of the glove on his hand, the handle of the bat in his grip, the sound of spikes on wooden walkways from the clubhouse to the dugout. The guys, the childish and silly and wonderful guys who were his teammates.

He heard a chair slap open behind and turned to see the woman there—back at last from wherever the hell she'd gone—sitting down in the first row of the box seats behind the screen, directly behind home.

She waved at him. He shook his head, but left home plate and walked over toward her.

"The fascists, Moe, and the Japanese."

"What?"

"You're such a kid, Moe. Forget about baseball, all right? Think about the fascists; you know, Hitler and Mussolini? Think about them and about Tojo and his emperor. Think about the absurdity of Japan occupying most of Northern California."

"What are you talking about?"

"Think about those things and think about home, Moe. Your reality. The war going better now that Patton's in charge of the invasion, the new Spitf ire jets that England's factories are cranking out, the way the Germans pulled back across the Channel after they couldn't hang onto their toehold in Sussex. Things are turning around in Europe, don't you think?"

Moe had read the Lodi
News
on the way to Oakland. He knew how the war here was going, and it was terrible. But she had better news, news from a few places back, a place where he was from. Things couldn't have changed too much since he'd left that behind.

"Rommel will never give up Cairo," Moe said, "and the way the Russians collapsed like an empty sack? Hell, the war could go on for years."

"But the Germans there don't have a superbomb, Moe, and that's because of you. Dominoes, Moe. All those dominoes."

She stood up, walked over to him. "The war is going even better elsewhere, Moe. There are places where Hitler is dead and the Germans are asking for peace. And
places where the Russians stopped the Germans cold, and where Rommel failed at Tobruk and never made it to Cairo."

He'd seen enough changes now to realize that was probably true. But then everything seemed to be true somewhere.

He shook his head. "So where have you been? And how'd you know I'd be here, in this damn banjo-hitters' ballpark?"

She just smiled at him and he realized that was a stupid question. He might be a long, long way from home—wherever that was—but he was still himself. Of course he would get to the ballpark.

"Look," he said to her as he unlatched the gate that blocked access to the field from the front row of the box seats, "it's time you told me exactly what you need me to do, all right? I know you say you'll be there, but things don't always seem to work out how you expect them to, you know?"

"True enough," she said.

"So for all I know I'm going to blink and you'll be gone again. Forever maybe, or for five seconds and then you show up in different clothes and your hair a different color."

"All right, Moe," she said. "You're right. And you know there are things I can't tell you, things we don't want to have change on us, right? But I'll do what I can to get you ready, Moe." She turned around to walk back to the seat she'd been in. She sat down, opened the folding chair next to hers, patted the seat, said, "Come on, Moe. Sit down here. It's time to talk about the next week of your most interesting life."

All right, Moe thought, about damn time. He stepped up into the stands, leaving the field behind, and sat down next to her.

"Moe," she said. "For starters, and this is important, it has to be two bullets to the chest."

Moe nodded. "Got it," he said. But his stomach felt a little queasy.

Marcus Brown was talking to Moe. "In thirty-nine," he was saying, "I was there with Ollie and Hughie the day you ran right over the catcher on that play at the plate to beat the Stars. Do you remember that play? It was quite a collision. Ollie still calls that the most exciting baseball play he's ever seen."

Moe smiled. He'd learned some things in Oakland earlier in the week and now felt more comfortable in the skin he was in here. "Sure I remember, and it hurt like hell. Mickey Kreitner was catching. He's a tough guy."

Brown shook his head. "Mickey died in the Battle of Redding, you know. Tragic."

"I know," Moe lied, "and I was sorry as hell to hear that. I liked him. He was a hell of a ballplayer."

Brownie smiled, shrugged, said, "It's been terrible, hasn't it? And yet here we are on this mountain, and this observatory will be famous all over the planet and somehow we Californians got it done. It feels good."

Moe didn't mention the Japanese help. And it
was
something, and it was pretty damn funny how Moe was starting to feel that really had been him in thirty-nine, scooping up groundballs and running the bases like a wild man all season long.

"You know," Moe said, "the truth is I wasn't having all that great a season. But Riley kept throwing me fastballs inside and I kept hitting them out. We won, I think."