“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.