An excited yell from Joe Simpkin in the tail gunner’s turret echoed in his headset. The gunner added, “One of those rockets flew through where we used to be.”
“Well, by God,” Ken Embry said softly. The pilot, who made a point of never letting anything impress him, added, “Who would have thought the boffins could actually get one right?”
“I’m rather glad they did,” Bagnall said, stressing his broad “a”s to show he also took such miracles for granted. The engineers down on the ground had been confident the Lizards would attack a radar-carrying aircraft with the same radar-homing rockets they’d used to wreck the British ground stations. Turn off the radar. and what would they have to home on? Nothing, Down on the ground, it all seemed as inexorably logical as a geometric proof. The boffins, however, didn’t have to test their theories in person. That was what’ aircrews were for.
“Shall I start it up again?” Goldfarb asked over the intercom. “No, better not, not quite yet,” Embry said after a moment’s thought.
“It does us no good if it isn’t running,” the radarman said plaintively.
It does us no bloody good if it gets us shot down, either, Bagnall thought. But that wasn’t fair, and he knew it. For someone whose only time in the air had been practicing for this mission, Goldfarb was doing fine. And not only was it natural for him to want to play with his toy, he had a point. A radar set that had to shut down as soon as action started to keep from being destroyed was better than no radar set at all, but not much. Along with letting Goldfarb talk directly with the fighters his radar directed, the boffins would have to come up with a way to let him keep the set operating without getting it and its aircraft blown out of the sky.
Ted Lane let out an ear-piercing Red Indian whoop. “A Mosquito just took out one of their planes. Bounced him from above, almost head-on—couldn’t very well come up on him from behind, could he, what with the Lizards’ being the faster aircraft. Says he saw the enemy break up in midair, and then he was diving for the deck for all he was worth.”
Everyone in the Lancaster cheered. Then Ken Embry said, “What about the rest of the Mosquitoes?”
After a moment, the radioman answered, “Er—several of them do not respond to my signal, sir.” That dashed the moment of exultation. The RAF was slowly, painfully learning how to hurt the Lizards. The Lizards already knew only too well how to hurt the RAF. Bagnall hoped the fighter pilots had managed to bail out. Trained men were harder to replace than airplanes.
From his station in front of the now-dark radar screen, Goldfarb said, “The chaps on the ground have been listening to us, too. With a bit of luck, they’ll also have hurt the Lizards: at least, they’ll have had the advantage of knowing a bit sooner from which direction they’re coming.”
“Fat bloody lot of good it’ll do them,” Embry said. Like any pilot, he pretended to disbelieve flak crews could possibly hit anything with their guns. If that attitude made flying seem safer for him, Bagnall was not about to complain. A calm pilot was a smooth pilot, and a smooth pilot was likeliest to bring his aircrew home again.
Goldfarb repeated, “May I turn the set on again, sir?”
Embry took his right hand off the stick, pounded a closed fist up and down on his thigh. Bagnall didn’t think he knew he was doing it. At last the pilot said, “Yes, go ahead; you may as well. As you’ve noted, that is the purpose of our being up here on this lovely fall evening.”
“Really?” Bagnall said. “And all the time I thought it was to see how fast the Lizards could shoot us down. The groundcrew have formed a pool on it, I understand. Did you toss in your shilling, Ken?”
“I’m afraid not,” Embry answered, imperturbable. “When they told me someone had already chosen twenty seconds after takeoff, I decided my chances for winning were about nil, so I held onto my money out of consideration for my heirs. What about you, old fellow?”
“Sorry to have spoiled your wager, but I’m afraid I’m the chap who took the twenty seconds after we left the ground.” Bagnall was not about to let the pilot outdo him in offhandedness, not this time. “I admit I did wonder how I’d go about collecting if I happened to win.”
The radar set, like any human-built piece of electronic apparatus, needed a little while to warm up after it went on. Bagnall had heard rumors that Lizard gear taken from shot-down planes went on instantly. He wondered if they were true; from what he knew, valves (tubes, the Americans called them) by their very nature required warm-up time. Maybe the Lizards didn’t use valves, though he had no idea what might take their place.
“Another flight incoming, same bearing as before,” Goldfarb announced. “Range…twenty-three miles and closing too bloody fast. Shall I shut it down now?”
“No, wait until they launch their rockets at us,” Embry said. Bagnall wondered if the pilot had lost his mind, and. even wondered if there really was a groundcrew pool and if Embry was trying to win it. But Embry proved to have method in his madness: We’ve already seen we can evade the rockets that track us by our own radar. If we shut down before they fire those, they may. get closer and shoot rockets of a different sort at us, ones we can’t evade.”
“Their tactics do tend to be stereotyped, don’t they?” Bagnall agreed after a little thought. “Given a choice, they’ll do the same thing over and over, regardless of whether it’s the right thing. And if it’s wrong, why give them the excuse to change?”
“Just what was in my—” Embry began.
Goldfarb interrupted him: “Rockets away! Shutting down—now.”
Again the Lancaster spun through the air; again Bagnall wondered if the fish and chips would stay down. And again, the Lizards’ rockets failed to bring down the British aircraft. “Maybe this isn’t a suicide mission after all,” Bagnall said happily. He’d had his doubts as the Lanc rolled down the runway.
Ted Lane listened to the surviving Mosquitoes as they made their runs at the attackers. “Another hit!” he said. This time, though, no one in the Lancaster shouted for joy. The aircrew had realized the price the fighter pilots were paying for every kill.
Then the radioman told Embry, “We are ordered to break off operations and return to base. The air vice marshal remarks that, having been lucky twice, he’s not inclined to tempt fate by pushing for a third bit of good fortune.”
“The air vice marshal is a little old woman,” the pilot retorted. He added hastily, “You need not inform him of my opinion, however. We shall of course obey his instructions like the good little children we are. Navigator, if you would be so kind as to suggest a course—”
“Suggest is the proper word, all right,” Alf Whyte said from his little curtained-off space behind the pilot’s and flight engineer’s seats. “What with some of the twists you put the aircraft through, I thought the compass was jitterbugging to a hot swing band. If we are where I think we are, a course of 078 will bring us to the general neighborhood of Dover in ten or twelve minutes.”
“Oh-seven-eight it is,” Embry said. “Turning to that course now.” He swung the bomber through the sky as if it were an extension of himself.
George Bagnall watched the neatly ordered phalanx of gauges in front of him as intently as if they monitored his own heartbeat and breathing. In a very real way, they did: if the Lancaster’s engines or hydraulic system failed, his heart would not go on beating for very long.
“I have contact with the airfield,” the radioman announced. “They read us five by five and report no damage from the Lizards this evening.”
“That’s good to hear,” Embry said. Bagnall nodded. The landing would be rough enough as it was, what with the hasty repairs to earlier repairs from the sky. The Lanc wouldn’t be coming in with combat damage or unexpended bombs, as it might have from a mission over Germany or France, but its fuel tanks were much fuller than they would have been on the return flight from such a mission. The petrol the plane burned made a more-than-satisfactory explosive when things went wrong.
Bagnall stared out through t
he Perspex. He tapped Embry on the arm. “Isn’t that the ocean approaching?”
Embry looked, too. “Sod me if it’s not. Alf, we’re coming up on the bloody North Sea. Are we north or south of where we want to be? I feel like a blind man tapping down the path with his stick, all the more so with that radar set back in the bomb bay. It ought to be able to find our way home for us all by its lonesome.”
“I dare say it will do precisely that one of these days,” the navigator answered. “I suggest you bear in mind, though, that the Lizards doubtless monitor every sort of signal we produce. Do you really care to guide them to the runway as you set down?”
“Now that you mention it, no. Ha!” Embry pointed down into the darkness. Bagnall’s eyes followed his finger. He too spied the red torch winking on and off. He flicked on the Lancaster’s wing lights, just for a moment, to acknowledge the signal.
Other torches, these white along one side of the runway and green along the other, sprang to life. Embry pointed. “Looks like a bloody aircraft carrier flight deck down there. I thought this was the RAF, not the Fleet Air Arm.”
“Could be worse,” Bagnall remarked. “At least the runway’s not pitching in a heavy sea.”
“There’s a cheerful thought.” Embry lined up the Lancaster on the two rows of torches, went into the final landing descent The hasty touchdown was less than smooth, but also less than disastrous: about par for a landing under war conditions, Bagnall thought. Along with the rest of the aircrew, he got out of the Lanc in a hurry and sprinted across the tarmac—now blacked out again—for the Nissen hut whose corrugated metal walls were surrounded by sandbags to protect against blast.
A tent of blackout curtains in front of the hut’s doorway let people go in and out without leaking light for all the world—and for unfriendly visitors from another world—to see. The glare of the bare bulbs strung from the Nissen hut’s ceiling smote Bagnall’s dark-accustomed eyes like a photographer’s flash.
The aircrew hurled themselves onto chairs and couches. Some, drained by the mission, fell asleep at once in spite of the glare. Others, Bagnall among them, dug out pipes and cigarettes.
“May I have one of those?” David Goldfarb asked, pointing to the flight engineer’s packet of Players. “I’m afraid I’m all out.”
Bagnall passed him a cigarette, leaned close to give him a light off the one he already had going. As the radarman inhaled, Bagnall said, “I expect you’ll be off to the White Horse Inn after the boffins get done grilling you over how things went tonight”
“What’s the point?” Goldfarb said, more in resignation than bitterness. “Oh, I expect I’ll drink there, but the girls—as I say, what’s the point?”
Bagnall also knew about the barmaids’ preferences. Now he stuck his tongue far into his cheek. “I think staring into the radar screen must have a deleterious effect on the brain. Did it never occur to you that you’ve just returned from flying a combat mission?”
The end of Goldfarb’s cigarette suddenly glowed a fierce red.
His eyes glowed, too. “I knew it only too bleeding well when those Lizard rockets homed on us. I confess I hadn’t thought of it in other terms, though. Thank you, sit”
Bagnall waved a hand in a parody of aristocratic elegance. “Delighted to be of service.” Service it had been, too—in an instant, he’d made the radarman forget all about the fear he’d just endured. He wished he could perform the same service for himself.
12
Ussmak cursed the day the Race had first discovered Tosev 3. He cursed the day the probe the Race had sent to this miserable world returned safely. He cursed the day he’d been hatched, the day he’d gone into cold sleep, the day he’d awakened. He cursed Krentel, something he’d been doing every day since the blundering idiot replaced Votal. He cursed the Big Uglies for killing Votal and then Telerep and leaving Krentel alive.
Most of all, he cursed the mud.
The landcruiser he drove was built to handle difficult terrain. On the whole, it did well. But Tosev 3, being a wetter place than any of the three worlds already in the Empire, had mixtures of water and dirt more thorough and more spectacularly gloppy than any of the Race’s engineers had imagined.
Ussmak was in the middle of one of those mixtures. As far as he could tell, it was most of a continent wide and most of a continent long. The Russkis only made matters worse by not paving any of their stinking roads. Once the rain soaked into what was allegedly a roadbed, the mud there was most of a continent deep, too.
He pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The landcruiser lurched forward. So long as he moved every little while, he was all right. If he stayed too long in one place, the machine started to sink. Its tracks were more than wide enough to support it on any reasonable surface. This gluey, slimy stuff was a long way from reasonable.
Ussmak accelerated again. The landcruiser plowed through the bog. Its tracks flung muck in all directions. Some of the muck—dead Emperors only knew how—splashed down onto Ussmak’s vision slit. He pressed a button. Detergent solution sprayed the armorglass clean. That was a relief. At least he wouldn’t have to unbutton and stick his head into the refrigerator outside.
Krentel had his cupola in the turret dogged down tight, too. A landcruiser commander was supposed to look out over the top of that cupola as much as he could, but Ussrnak, though he blamed Krentel for a lot of things, couldn’t blame him for not wanting to freeze his snout off.
At that, the driver thought, gunning the landcruiser forward once more, things could have been worse. He could have been driving a truck instead. The wheeled vehicles the landcruiser was supposed to be protecting had a much rougher time in this accursed bog than he did. He’d already used his towing chain to pull two or three of them out of places where they’d sunk worse than axle-deep. That the trucks had to be shielded just made them heavier and the sticking problem worse.
For that matter, Ussmak could have been one of the poor wretches in radiation suits who guddled around in the freezing Tosevite slime for the bits of radioactive material their detectors found. The radiation suits weren’t heated—no one had foreseen the need (no one had foreseen that the Big Uglies would be able to blow the 67th Emperor Sohrheb all over the landscape, either). The males in those suits had to labor in shifts, one group going back to a warming station while the other emerged to work.
Krentel’s voice rang in the intercom button taped to Ussmak’s hearing diaphragm. “Maintain heightened alertness, driver. I have just received a report that Tosevite bandit groups may be operating in the area. Primary defense responsibilities fall on our glorious landcruiser forces.”
“As you say, Commander,” Ussmak answered. “It shall be done.” How he was supposed to be especially alert for bandits when he could see only straight ahead with the landcruiser buttoned was beyond him. Maybe Krentel ought to open up the cupola and look around after all.
He thought about saying as much to the landcruiser commander, but decided not to bother. The Race did not encourage lower ranks to reprove their superiors; that way lay anarchy. In any case, Ussmak doubted that Krentel would have listened; he seemed to think the Emperor had personally granted him all the answers. And finally, Ussmak’s own sense of isolation from everything going on around him had only grown worse since his two original landcruiser crewmales died. A good replacement for Votal would have taken pains to reforge the team. Krentel just treated him like a piece of machinery. Machines don’t care.
Machinelike, Ussmak kept the landcruiser out of as much trouble as he could. He’d found some better ground, where the grass, now yellow and dying rather than green and shiny with life, was still thick enough under his tracks to keep the landcruiser from sinking as fast as it had on barer terrain.
Ahead lay a stand of low, scrubby trees. Their bare branches groped for the sky like thin, beseeching arms. They’d dropped their leaves when the rains started. Ussmak wondered why; it seemed wasteful to him. Certainly none of the trees back on Home behaved in such pr
ofligate fashion.
He missed Home. Although the idea of turning Tosev 3 into another version of his own world had seemed good and noble when he got into the cold-sleep capsule, everything he’d seen since he came out of it screamed that it wasn’t going to be as easy as everybody had thought. Given the Big Uglies’ intractability, he wondered how the Race had succeeded so well on Rabotev 2 and Halless 1.
He also wondered why no one else seemed to have any doubts about what the Race was doing here. The males had just formed their own rather compressed version of society back Home and gone on about their business, changing original plans only because the Tosevites had more technology than anyone expected. No one worried about the rightness of what they were doing.
Even Ussmak had no real idea of what the Race’s forces ought to be doing now that they’d come to Tosev 3. He supposed the doubts he did have sprang from his own feeling of apartness from everyone around him, from having been wrenched out of his comfortable niche in the original landcruiser crew and thrust into the unwanted company not merely of strangers, but of pompous, inept strangers.
Behind him, the turret traversed with a whir of smooth machinery. The coaxial machine gun began to chatter. “We shall rout out any Big Uglies lurking among the trees,” Krentel declared with his usual grandiloquence.
For once, though, the commander’s tone failed to grate on Ussmak. Krentel was actually doing something sensible. Ussmak cherished that when it happened. Had it happened more often, he might have been content even on this miserable, cold, wet ball of mud.
Machine-gun bullets whined less than a meter above Heinrich Jäger’s head. Had any leaves remained on the birch trees, the bullets would have shaken the last of them dow. As it was, he used the fallen leaves to help conceal himself from the Lizard-panzer firing from the open country ahead.
The wet ground and wet leaves soaked Jäger’s shabby clothes. Rain beat on his back and trickled down his neck. He suppressed a sneeze by main force. A round ricocheting from a tree trunk kicked mud up into his face.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 39