There was a spout and roar from the throat of the sewer.
The soldiers hurled themselves to the street.
Boaz, as the real commander of the company, was the first to raise his head. He saw the smoke coming from the sewer, supposed that it was sewer gas that had exploded.
Boaz slipped his hand into his pocket, pressed a button, fed to his company the signal that would make them stand up again.
As they stood, Boaz stood, too. “God damn, buddy,” he said, “I guess we done had a baptism of fire.”
He picked up his end of the siege mortar’s tube.
There was nobody to pick up the other end.
Unk had gone in search of his wife and son and his best friend.
Unk had gone over the hill on flat, flat, flat, flat Mars.
The son that Unk was looking for was named Chrono.
Chrono was, by Earthling reckoning, eight years old. He was named after the month in which he had been born. The Martian year was divided into twenty-one months, twelve with thirty days, and nine with thirty-one. These months were named January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, Winston, Niles, Rumfoord, Kazak, Newport, Chrono, Synclastic, Infundibulum, and Salo.
Mnemonically:
Thirty days have Salo, Niles, June, and September,
Winston, Chrono, Kazak, and November,
April, Rumfoord, Newport, and Infundibulum.
All the rest, baby mine, have thirty-one.
The month of Salo was named after a creature Winston Niles Rumfoord knew on Titan. Titan, of course, is an extremely pleasant moon of Saturn.
Salo, Rumfoord’s crony on Titan, was a messenger from another galaxy who was forced down on Titan by the failure of a part in his space ship’s power plant. He was waiting for a replacement part.
He had been waiting patiently for two hundred thousand years.
His ship was powered, and the Martian war effort was powered, by a phenomenon known as UWTB, or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of nothingness – that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness.
Many Earthlings are glad. that Earth does not have UWTB.
As the popular doggerel has it:
Willy found some Universal Will to Become,
Mixed it with his bubble gum.
Cosmic piddling seldom pays:
Poor Willy’s six new Milky Ways.
Unk’s son Chrono was, at eight years old, a wonderful player of a game called German batball. German batball was all that he cared about. German batball was the major sport on Mars – in the grammar school, in the Army, and in the factory workers’ recreation areas.
Since there were only fifty-two children on Mars, Mars got along with just one grammar school, right in the middle of Phoebe. None of the fifty-two children there had been conceived on Mars. All had been conceived either on Earth or, as in Chrono’s case, on a space ship bringing new recruits to Mars.
The children in the school studied very little, since the society of Mars had no particular use for them. They spent most of their time playing German batball.
The game of German batball is played with a flabby ball the size of a big honeydew melon. The ball is no more lively than a ten-gallon hat filled with rain water. The game is something like baseball, with a batter striking the ball into a field of opposing players and running around bases; and with the fielders attempting to catch the ball and frustrate the runner. There are, however, only three bases in German batball – first, second, and home. And the batter is not pitched to. He places the ball on one fist and strikes the ball with his other fist. And if a fielder succeeds instriking the runner with the ball when the runner is between bases, the runner is deemed out, and must leave the playing field at once.
The person responsible for the heavy emphasis on German batball on Mars was, of course, Winston Niles Rumfoord, who was responsible for everything on Mars.
Howard W. Sams proves in his Winston Niles Rumfoord, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci that German batball was the only team sport with which Rumfoord was at all familiar as a child. Sams shows that Rumfoord was taught the game, when a child, by his governess, a Miss Joyce MacKenzie.
Back in Rumfoord’s childhood in Newport, a team composed of Rumfoord, Miss MacKenzie, and Earl Moncrief the butler, used to play German batball regularly against a team composed of Watanabe Wataru the Japanese gardener, Beverly June Wataru the gardener’s daughter, and Edward Seward Darlington the half-wit stable boy. Rumfoord’s team invariably won.
Unk, the only deserter in the history of the Army of Mars, now crouched panting behind a turquoise boulder and watched the school children playing German batball on the iron playground. Behind the boulder with Unk was a bicyde he had stolen from a gas-mask factory’s bicycle rack. Unk did not know which child was his son, which child was Chrono.
Unk’s plans were nebulous. His dream was to gather together his wife, his son, and his best friend, to steal a space ship, and to fly away to some place where they could all live happily ever after.
“Hey, Chrono!” cried a child on the playground. “You’re up to bat!”
Unk peered around the boulder at home plate. The child who came up to bat there would be Chrono, would be his son.
Chrono, Unk’s son, came up to bat.
He was small for his age, but surprisingly manly through the shoulders. The child’s hair was jet black, bristly – and the black bristles grew in a violently counter-clockwise swirl.
The child was left-handed. The ball rested on his right fist, and he prepared to hit it with his left.
His eyes were deep-set, like his father’s eyes. And his eyes were luminous under their black-thatched eaves. They glowed with an unshared rage.
Those rage-filled eyes flicked this way, then that. Their movements rattled the fielders, drawing them away from their positions, convincing them that the slow, stupid ball was going to come at them with terrible speed, was going to tear them to pieces if they dared to get in the way.
The alarm inspired by the boy at bat was felt by the teacher, too. She was in the traditional position for an umpire in German batball, between first and second base, and she was terrified. She was a frail old lady name Isabel Fenstermaker. She was seventy-three, and had been a Jehovah’s Witness before having her memory cleaned out. She had been shanghaied while trying to sell a copy of The Watchtower to a Martian agent in Duluth.
“Now, Chrono – ” she said simperingly, “it’s only a game, you know.”
The sky was suddenly blackened by a formation of a hundred flying saucers, the bloodred ships of the Martian Parachute Ski Marines. The combined cooing of the ships was a melodious thunder that rattled the schoolhouse windowpanes.
But, as a measure of the importance young Chrono gave to German batball when he came to bat, not a single child looked up at the sky.
Young Chrono, having brought the fielders and Miss Fenstermaker to the brink of nervous collapse, now put the ball down by his feet, took from his pocket a short strip of metal that was his goodluck piece. He kissed the strip for luck, returned the strip to his pocket.
Then he suddenly picked up the ball again, hit it a mighty bloop, and went scrambling around the bases.
The fielders and Miss Fenstermaker dodged the ball as though it were a red-hot cannonball. When the ball came to a stop of its own accord, the fielders went after it with a sort of ritual clumsiness. Clearly, the point of their efforts was not to hit Chrono with the ball, was not to put him out. The fielders were all conspiring to increase the glory of Chrono by making a show of helpless opposition.
Clearly, Chrono was the most glorious thing that the children had ever seen on Mars, and any glory they themselves had came from their association with him.. They would do anything to make his glory grow.
Young Chrono slid into home in a cloud of rust.
A fielder hurled the ball at him – too late, too late, much too late. The fielder ritually cursed his luck.
Young Chrono stood, dusted himself off, and again kissed his goodluck piece, thanked it for another home run. He believed firmly that all his powers came from the goodluck piece, and so did his schoolmates, and so, secretly, did Miss Fenstermaker.
The history of the goodluck piece was this:
One day the school children were taken by Miss Fenstermaker on an educational tour of a flamethrower factory. The factory manager explained to the children all the steps in the manufacture of flamethrowers, and hoped that some of the children, when they grew up, would want to come to work for him. At the end of the tour, in the packaging department, the manager’s ankle became snarled in a spiral of steel strapping, a type of strapping that was used for binding shut the packaged flamethrowers.