All Clear

by Connie Willis

  Let’s hope I don’t have to sneak inside to find him, Mike thought, though if he did, at least it wouldn’t be hard. There was a fence but no barbed wire, and the gate’s bar wasn’t even lowered. It didn’t look at all like a military installation, let alone the site of the most closely guarded secret of the war. It looked like Balliol in midterm. The young women walking between the buildings, file folders clasped to their breasts, could be students; the men playing a game on the lawn could be the cricket team.

  He could imagine what the regimented, spit-and-polish Germans would make of this place and its inhabitants. Maybe that was why they’d never figured out that the British had cracked the Enigma code. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that these giggling young women and disheveled daydreamers could be a threat. The Nazis would have had nothing but contempt for Dilly’s girls and the stammering Turing.

  Which was why they’d been defeated. They shouldn’t have underestimated them. And he’d better not underestimate them either. For all he knew, the scruffy professor smoking over by the gate or the blonde dabbing powder on her nose worked for British Intelligence and would shortly knock on his landlady’s door to “ask him a few questions.” In which case he’d better get out of here before he attracted their attention.

  He waited till a staff car pulled up to the gate and the guard leaned in the window to talk to the driver and then casually joined the stream of people walking back to town. Once there, he bought a pipe, tobacco, and a newspaper, went to the lobby of the Milton, looked around to make sure Wilson or Menzies wasn’t there, and sat down in a chair by the window to wait for the four o’clock shift change and look for Gerald.

  When he didn’t see him, he followed two men who looked like cryptanalysts to a pub, ordered a pint of ale, and spent the evening nursing it and observing everyone who came in.

  He did the same thing at a different pub over the next few nights. The first night he pretended to be reading a newspaper, but it was awkward seeing over it, so the next night he folded it open to the crossword and pretended to be working it, like he had in the hospital sunroom at Orpington. That way he could stare thoughtfully into space—as if trying to think of an answer—while scanning the room, though he wasn’t sure it was necessary. No one paid any attention to him. The men either talked in heads-bent-together groups, scribbled busily, or sat with their heads in a book—Haas’s Atomic Theory, Broglie’s Matter and Light, and, in one instance, an Agatha Christie. He’d have to tell Eileen.

  He didn’t run into Turing again—literally or figuratively. Or Welchman. He did see Dilly Knox at the wheel of a car, and the girls hadn’t exaggerated about his bad driving. The two naval officers ahead of him had to leap for the curb. He glimpsed the girls twice but managed to escape both times without their seeing him.

  His only problem (aside from not having found Phipps) was staying in contact with Eileen and Polly. Wednesday night he’d realized he hadn’t told them his address yet and had spent the next two days trying to find a phone where he could talk and not be overheard. He finally went back to the train station—after first watching Dilly’s girls leave for their shift so he wouldn’t run into them—and called from there, but no one answered, and the station was full of people all through the weekend.

  He wasn’t able to get hold of Polly till Monday. He told her where he was living and what he was doing to find Gerald. “Good,” Polly said, and asked him what the original order of his drops had been.

  He told her. “Why?” he asked curiously.

  “I was just trying to remember other historians who might be here,” she said, “or might be Historian X, and I wanted to make certain they weren’t you.”

  “They weren’t,” he said and asked her if the retrieval team had responded to any of their ads, which they hadn’t. He didn’t tell her about Dilly’s girls or Welchman or about colliding with Turing that first night. There hadn’t been any repercussions from that. The accident hadn’t even made Turing mend his ways. On Saturday night he’d overheard a Wren complaining loudly about his having nearly run her down the night before.

  Nobody seemed to worry about being overheard, and listening to them and watching their casual comings and goings, he wondered how the government had managed to keep Ultra’s secret from getting out. New people arrived every day, jamming the already overcrowded town. And the station. He gave up on the idea of calling Polly and Eileen again and sent them a note hidden in the squares of a torn-out newspaper crossword puzzle, instructing them to check the old remote drop in St. John’s Wood and hoping Polly would recognize it was a code, and then went back to trying to find Gerald.

  He made the rounds of the Park gates, the boardinghouses, the hotels, and then went back to sitting in the pubs, though they were so crowded he couldn’t find an empty table. Monday night Mike had to squeeze to the counter to order his pint of ale and then lean against the bar for over an hour, waiting for one where he could sit, pretend to work his crossword, eavesdrop, and watch for Phipps.

  A small knot of men stood in the far corner, talking and laughing, but they were all too tall to be Phipps. At the table next to them sat a bald man, doing calculations on the back of an envelope, and next to him, his back to Mike, was a sandy-haired guy. He was talking to a pretty brunette, and from the annoyed look on her face, he might very well be telling her an unfunny joke.

  Mike moved his chair, trying to see his face. No luck. He looked down at his crossword for a moment, then up again, tapping his pencil against his nose, waiting for the guy to turn around.

  The men in the corner were leaving, stopping as they went out to talk to the girls at the table between Mike and the sandy-haired guy.

  Get out of the way, Mike thought, leaning so he could see past them.

  “Good Lord,” a man’s voice behind him said, “you’re the last person I expected to see here.”

  Mike looked up, startled. He’d completely forgotten about the possibility that Phipps might recognize him. But it wasn’t Phipps standing over the table. It was Tensing, the officer he’d conspired with in the sunroom of the hospital at Orpington.

  We’ll Meet Again.

  —WORLD WAR II SONG

  Dulwich—Summer 1944

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU’VE REMEMBERED WHERE WE met, Officer Lang?” Mary said, trying not to look as cornered as she felt seeing him standing there in the common room of the ambulance post. “I thought we agreed that line of chat didn’t work.”

  “It’s not a line, Isolde,” he said, and smiled his crooked smile. “I have remembered where we met.”

  Oh, no. Then she had met him—or rather, would meet him—on her next assignment. And now she’d have to pretend she remembered him, too, without knowing how well she’d known him or under what circumstances. And she’d have to hope he hadn’t remembered what her name had been—correction, would be.

  Where’s Fairchild? she thought, looking toward the door. She promised she’d come rescue me.

  “You said you have good news to tell me as well?” she said, stalling.

  “I have indeed.” He bowed formally. “I’m here to deliver my thanks and the thanks of a grateful nation.”

  “The thanks … for what?”

  “For giving me a smashing idea, which I shall tell you all about when I take you to that dinner I owe you, and don’t say you can’t because I’ve already found out from your fellow FANY here that you’re off duty tonight. And if it’s flying bombs you’re worried about, I can assure you there won’t be any more tonight.”

  “But…,” she said, glancing hopefully back at the door. Where was Fairchild?

  “No buts, Isolde. It’s destiny. We’re fated to be together through all time. Not only have I remembered where we met, I also know why you don’t remember.”

  You do? Could she somehow have betrayed her identity, and he knew she was an historian? I should have told Fairchild to come in immediately instead of waiting five minutes.

  “I only just remembered, I forgot to lo
g in,” she said, starting toward the door. “I’ll be back straightaway.” But he grabbed her hand.

  “Wait. You can’t go till I’ve told you about the flying bombs. I’ve found a way to stop them. Remember how I told you the generals were after me to invent a way to shoot them down before they reached their target?”

  “And you thought of one?”

  “I told you, shooting them down doesn’t work because the bomb still goes off.”

  “So you’ve found a way to keep the bomb from going off?” she said, thinking, He can’t have. The RAF was never able to devise a way to disable the V-1s’ bombs in flight.

  “No. I found a way to turn them round and send them back across the Channel. Or at any rate away from the target.”

  “This isn’t the lassoing-it-with-a-rope plan, is it?”

  “No.” He laughed. “This doesn’t require a rope or cannons. All that’s needed is a Spitfire and some expert flying. That’s the beauty of it. All I do is catch up to the V-1 till the Spitfire’s just below it—”

  And edge your wing under the V-1’s fin, she thought, and then angle your plane slightly so the fin tips up and sends the rocket careening off course.

  She had read about the practice of V-1 tipping when she was prepping for this assignment. But it was an incredibly dangerous thing to attempt. The Spitfire’s wing could be crumpled by the heavier metal of the V-1, or the contact could send the Spitfire into a disastrous tailspin. Or, if the Spitfire came up on the V-1 too fast, they could both explode.

  The sickening thought flickered through her mind that this was the reason the net hadn’t prevented her from driving him out of the way of those V-1s. It hadn’t mattered that she’d saved his life because he was going to be killed tipping them.

  “And then we come up under the wing,” he was saying, and demonstrated, bringing one of his hands up under the other, “and tilt it ever so slightly”—he nudged the hand on top—“so that it tips.” The hand on top angled up and then veered off. “The rocket’s got a delicate gyroscopic mechanism. Most of the time we needn’t even touch it.”

  He demonstrated it again, this time without his hands touching, and as she watched him, boyishly intent on explaining how it worked, she had the same feeling she’d had in Whitehall that afternoon, that there was something familiar about him.

  “The slipstream does the work for us,” he said, “and the V-1 goes spiraling down into the Channel, or, if we’re truly lucky, back to France and the launcher it came from, without us so much as laying a finger on it. We’ve downed thirty already this week.”

  And that’s why the number of rockets has been down, she thought. Not because of Intelligence’s misinformation campaign, but because Stephen and his fellow pilots have been playing “Tag, you’re it” with the rockets.

  “—And not a single casualty on the ground,” he was saying happily. “But that’s not the best of it. What I came to tell you—”

  “Triumph!” someone called from the corridor.

  Finally, she thought. “In here!” she called back.

  “Triumph?” Stephen said. “I thought your name was Kent.”

  “They’ve been calling me that since the motorcycle incident,” she explained, wondering why Fairchild hadn’t appeared. “That and DeHavilland and Norton,” she said. “The name of every motorcycle they can think of, in fact. Oh, and also Lawrence of Arabia. Because he crashed his motorcycle, you know.”

  “I quite understand,” he said, grinning. “My nickname at school was Spots. And the name Triumph suits you. Which reminds me, I was going to tell you where we met.”

  Where was Fairchild? “I really must go log in. The Major—” she began, and the door opened.

  But it was only Parrish. “Oh, sorry,” she said when she saw Stephen, “didn’t mean to interrupt. You haven’t got the keys to Bela, have you, DeHavilland?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll come help you look for them—”

  “No, I wouldn’t dream of dragging you away from such a handsome young man,” Parrish said, smiling flirtatiously at Stephen. “You wouldn’t happen to have a twin, would you? One who’s fond of jitterbugging?”

  “Sorry,” he said, grinning.

  “Truly. I can help you look—” Mary began.

  “Don’t bother. They’re probably in the despatch room,” Parrish said. “Ta.” And she left, closing the door behind her.

  “Lieutenant Parrish is a very good dancer,” Mary said. “And she’s very much in favor of wartime attachments. You should ask her to go—”

  “It won’t work, you know,” he said. “You can’t get rid of me. Or deny our destiny. And the reason you don’t remember our meeting is because it was in another lifetime.”

  “A … another … lifetime?” she stammered.

  “Yes,” he said, and smiled that heartbreakingly crooked smile. “Far in the distant past. I was a king in Babylon, and you were a Christian slave.”

  And that was a poem by William Ernest Henley. He’s quoting poetry, not talking about time travel, she thought. Thank goodness. She was so relieved she laughed.

  “I’m deadly serious,” he said. “Our souls have been destined to be together throughout history. I told you, we were Tristan and Isolde.” He moved in closer. “We were Pelleas and Melisande, Heloise and Abelard.” He leaned toward her. “Catherine and Heathcliff—”

  “Catherine and Heathcliff are not historical figures, and there weren’t any Christian slaves in Babylon,” she said, slipping neatly away from him. “It was B.C., not A.D.”

  “There, you see,” he said, pointing delightedly at her. “What you did just then, that’s exactly it! That’s what—”

  “Norton!” a voice called from the corridor. “Kent!”

  And there’s Fairchild, she thought wryly, when I no longer need to be rescued. She hadn’t met him on an upcoming assignment, or on any assignment. He was only flirting—and he was so good at it she was almost sorry she’d asked Fairchild to come drag her away.

  Though it was probably just as well. Stephen was entirely too charming, and it was entirely too easy to forget that she was a hundred years too old for him, that they were even more star-crossed than the lovers he’d named. If he’d been from 2060 instead of 1944—

  “Kent!” Fairchild called again. “Mary!”

  “I’d best go see what’s wanted,” she said, and started for the door, but Fairchild had already flung it open.

  “Oh, good, there you are. You’re wanted on the telephone. It’s the hospital. You can take it in the—oh, my goodness!” she shouted, and, astonishingly, shot past Mary and launched herself at Stephen. “Stephen!” she cried, flinging her arms about his neck. “What are you doing here?”

  “Bits and Pieces! Good God!” he said, hugging her and then holding her at arm’s length to look at her. “What am I doing here? What are you doing here?”

  “This is my FANY unit,” Fairchild said. “And I’m not Bits and Pieces. I’m Lieutenant Fairchild.” She saluted smartly. “I drive an ambulance.”

  “An ambulance?” he said. “You can’t possibly. You’re not old enough.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I am. My birthday was last week, wasn’t it, Kent?” she said, looking over at Mary. “Kent, this is Stephen Lang, the pilot I told you about.”

  The person Fairchild had been in love with since she was six, the one she’d said was in love with her as well, only he didn’t know it yet. Oh, God.

  “Our families live next to each other in Surrey,” Fairchild said happily. “We’ve known each other since we were infants.”

  “Since you were an infant,” Stephen said, smiling fondly at her. “The last time I saw you, you were in pigtails.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” Fairchild said. “I thought you were stationed at Tangmere. Mother said—”

  “I was, and then at Hendon,” he said, looking at Mary. “But I’ve just
been transferred to Biggin Hill.”

  “Biggin Hill? What good news! That means you’ll be only a few miles away.”

  And squarely in the heart of Bomb Alley. It was already the most-hit airfield, and when Intelligence’s misinformation made the rockets begin to fall short, it would be even more dangerous. As if tipping V-1s wasn’t dangerous enough.

  “How lovely!” Fairchild was saying. “How did you find out I was here? Did Mother write to you?”

  “No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I had no idea you were here. I came to see Lieutenant Kent.”

  “Lieutenant Kent? I didn’t know you two knew each other.”

  “I drove him to a meeting in London last month after Talbot wrenched her knee. The Major asked me to substitute. But I had no idea you knew him,” Mary said, thinking, Please believe me.

  “And I had no idea you knew my little sister,” he said.

  “I’m not your sister,” Fairchild said. “And I’m not an infant. I told you, I’m nineteen. I’m all grown up.”

  “You’ll always be sweet little Bits and Pieces to me.” He tousled her hair and smiled at Mary. “I hope you girls are taking good care of this youngster.”

  Oh, worse and worse. “She doesn’t need taking care of,” Mary said. “She’s the best driver in our unit.”

  “Oh, no, she’s not. You are,” he said. “That’s one of the things I came to tell you. Do you remember when I told you to turn down Tottenham Court Road on our way to Whitehall, and you turned the wrong way? Well, it was fortunate you did. A V-1 smashed down in the middle of it not five minutes later.”

  He turned to Fairchild. “She saved my life.” He smiled at Mary. “I told you our meeting was destiny.”

  “Destiny?” Fairchild said, looking stricken.

  “Abso—”

  “Absolutely not,” Mary cut in before he could ruin things even more completely, “and I fail to see how making a wrong turn constitutes expert driving. And the reason we met was because I couldn’t tell a flying bomb from a motorcycle.”

  She turned to Fairchild. “Did you say there was a trunk call for me? I’d best go take it.” She started for the door. “It was nice seeing you again, Flight Officer Lang.”