It was over here, and Sparky knew it.
But couldn't he have finished this last game?
"Gotta go, fellas," he said, getting up. "Sorry, but it's an emergency."
"Sure, Sparky."
"Hey, good game, Spark-man!"
"What a play! They'll be talking about that one tonight."
He went down the line, shaking hands, getting pats on the rump, nobody mentioning he wouldn't be back, but everyone aware of it.
Suddenly he knew, without knowing how he knew, that these boys knew exactly who he was, and had from the first. He had a vivid vision of a group of them hiding in the hayloft, alert for approaching parents, gathered around a clandestine throwaway television set. Tuning in to the latest episode of Sparky and His Gang. Of course they knew. And the wonderful thing was, in all the time he'd been coming here no one had ever asked him for an autograph or a souvenir from the set. But they knew he was about to grow up, and they knew they would never see him again. He looked at the ground where his father had thrown the newspad. It had vanished. Soon it would be squirreled away in somebody's sock drawer, to be brought out in the dead of night and read by candlelight.
Impulsively, he thrust his prized outfielder's mitt into the hands of a surprised Jan Stoltzfus, another boy about to become a young man, but at the normal rate. Soon he'd be playing with the grown-ups. They embraced, and Sparky turned away, followed his father around the backstop and off the field.
The tunnel from the Amish settlements to the fringes of King City was five miles long, paved with packed dirt, lit by gas jets that had blackened the stone tunnel walls every fifty feet. They were two hundred feet beneath the Lunar surface, safe as houses. Sparky and his father sat on the lowered wooden tailgate of a wagon piled high with fresh produce in bushel baskets and slatted crates. The wagon had rubber-rimmed wheels. It creaked from every joint as it rolled slowly over the packed dirt. There was the steady clop-clop of the two placid Percherons who had been over this road a thousand times, and there was the sound of his father's voice, droning on about some problem or other concerning his dream, the John Barrymore Valentine Theater. Sparky heard none of it. He was off in a world of his own.
He hadn't really thought this growing-up business was going to change his life that much. The thing was, he had already thought of himself as grown up. True, he was small, he had a child's body, but his mind was that of a mature man. For that matter, he sometimes thought he'd been born mature. He didn't recall a time when he hadn't had an adult's outlook on life, shouldered a man's burdens. His relationship to John Valentine was sometimes more of a father to a reckless son than the other way around.
But this was going to change everything. You didn't just get a larger uniform when you grew up, when you got bigger. You put away baseball for good.
Sure, he could get into an adult league of duffers, smack the ol' pill around in his spare time, weekends, after work. But he knew without even trying it that it wouldn't be the same. Adult baseball was a way to keep the weight off without surgery, stretch the muscles. Maintenance on the old ticker, you shouldn't need a new one every five years. For the pros it was a job, but Sparky would never be that good. To a kid, baseball was a world unto itself. Baseball was youth.
"Why do I get the impression you haven't heard a word I've said?"
"What?" Sparky looked up. "Oh, I guess I was just somewhere else."
John Valentine made a noncommittal grunt, then reached behind him and took a twenty-dollar beefsteak tomato from a basket full of them. He bit into it. Juice and seeds ran down his chin.
"I never even knew these people were out here," Valentine said. "Had a hell of a time finding the place."
"They don't get a lot of visitors," Sparky said.
"No television, you said. No movies. What do they do for entertainment? Any live theater?"
"I don't think they approve of that, either. They farm, mostly. Work the soil. The women quilt, you know, sew these big blanket things. They're worth a fortune when they're done. They cook wonderful food."
"Maybe we should have bought a pie or something."
"They don't sell those. Or the muffins."
"Smelled pretty good to me." He took another bite of the tomato. "This is a good tomato, too, but not worth what they were charging up there at the farmer's market." He tossed the remains of the tomato off the back of the wagon.
"No," Sparky said. "Probably not."
I never did get another of those muffins. But to this day, when I smell cornbread, I think of Amish baseball.
The first leg of the Halley's odyssey was Uranus to Jupiter, a trip not often made since the Invasion, two hundred years ago. Technically, it was illegal to approach Jupiter, but people did it from time to time and almost always got away with it. Space had always been too vast to really police, and Jupiter wasn't in the jurisdiction of any human-inhabited world. The only nation really interested in total interdiction was Luna, the grandly and rather nervously named Outpost State, which had existed for two hundred years only a quarter of a million miles away from the Invaders. The aliens had landed on Earth and on Jupiter. On Earth, they had wiped out all human life and destroyed all trace of human existence. What they did on Jupiter was anybody's guess. There had been no commerce humanity was aware of between the two planets in all that time. Luna would like it to stay that way. There was no reason to doubt the Invaders could finish the job, destroy all humanity, in a weekend if they took the notion. It seemed wise never to give them a reason, and therefore wise never to call too much attention to the affairs of humans.
But Luna was alone in seeing the Invaders as a continuing threat. The rest of the system would just as soon not think about Jupiter and the horrors it might conceal, which meant no one watched too closely. If you assumed an orbit and looked as if you planned to stay awhile, a ship would be dispatched to take you into custody. If you just used the gas giant's gravity well for a boost or a course change, as people in a hurry sometimes did... well, it was easy to lose yourself in traffic once back in the crowded trajectories of the inner planets. Space was vast.
I don't pretend to know just what Hal did to get us a course change with minimal expenditure of fuel. Something about coming around in front of the hideous planet, braking a bit, swinging around, and boosting again. I know we were under acceleration twice, neither time anything like the agony of the first boost at Uranus. When it was all done, we were aimed almost directly at the sun. Hal told me that getting to the sun was the most difficult destination in the system, in terms of energy. Which makes no sense at all, since it is so damn big and has so much gravity, right? But that's what he said, and at the price somebody paid for him, he ought to know. He said it was easier to aim for the sun from out here, where our orbital velocity was low, than farther in, where we'd have picked up too much speed. To which I might have said "Huh?" if I wasn't so dignified. I thought speed was the whole point.
There was a circular room atop the habidome that we called the cockpit. It was set up with Buck Rogers panels that theoretically could control all aspects of the ship's systems, but which had never been used, since Hal could do it all so much better. I imagined the original owner had liked to do what I did from time to time, which was sit in the captain's chair with my feet up on the "dashboard," studying the cosmos with a feeling of power, king of all I surveyed.
The view up there was of a hemisphere of space, like being under a glass dome, or in a planetarium. The second image was more accurate, because what we saw was an artifact, created by Hal. It looked real enough. But remember we were spinning almost all the time, at the end of a long rope with the engines at the other end. If the dome had been glass the stars would have whirled around us, too fast for comfortable viewing. Hal cleaned all that up, made it look like we were motoring down a vast, black highway, smooth as glass. There was a control at my fingertips which would give me any angle I wanted. Of course, except near Jupiter no motion was visible at all.