Goldfarb had a Military Medal himself, but it didn’t match up. Nor did he: other rank, medium-sized, lean, with the features and dark, curly hair of an Eastern European Jew. Sitting down next to Roundbush reminded him of how un-English he looked. His parents had got out of Poland a little before the First World War. A lot of people hadn’t been so lucky. He knew that very well.
“Stella, darling!” Roundbush called, waving. Because it was he, the barmaid came right away, with a broad smile on her face. “Pint of best bitter for my friend here, and another for me as well.”
“Right y’are, dearie,” Stella said, and swayed away.
Roundbush stared after her. “By God, I’d like to take a bite out of that arse,” he declared. His upper-class accent made the sentiment sound a trifle odd, but no less sincere for that.
“As a matter of fact, so would I,” Goldfarb said. He sighed. He didn’t have very much chance of that, not just with Roundbush next to him but with the pub-with the whole experimental station-full of officers.
Stella came back with the tall glasses of beer. Roundbush banged his teeth together. If Goldfarb had done that, he’d have got his face slapped. For the mustachioed fighter pilot, Stella giggled.Where is justice? Goldfarb wondered, a thought that would have been more Talmudic had it been directed to something other than trying to end up in bed with a barmaid.
Basil Roundbush raised his glass on high. Goldfarb dutifully followed suit. Instead of proposing a toast to Stella’s hindquarters, as the radarman had expected, Roundbush said, “To the Meteor!” and drank.
“To the Meteor!” Goldfarb drank, too. When you got right down to it, a jet fighter was more toastworthy than a barmaid’s backside, and less likely to cause fights, too.
“On account of the Meteor, we’re going to be good chaps and pedal on back to barracks at closing time,” Roundbush said. “We’re going up tomorrow afternoon, and the powers that be take a dim view of improving one’s outlook, even with such camel piss as this allegedly best bitter, within twelve hours of a flight.”
The thin, sour beer did leave a good deal to be desired, even by wartime standards. Goldfarb was about to agree to that, with the usual profane embellishments, when he really heard what the flight officer had said. “We’regoing up?” he said. “They’ve installed a radar in a Meteor at last, then?”
“That they have,” Roundbush said. “It will give us rather better odds against the Lizards, wouldn’t you say?”
He spoke lightly. He’d flown a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain when a fighter pilot’s life expectancy was commonly measured in days. But a Spitfire had had an even chance against a Messerschmitt Bf-109. Against Lizard aircraft, you had to be lucky just to come back from a combat mission. Actually shooting the enemy down was about as likely as winning the Irish Sweepstakes.
“D’you think we’ll actually be able to accomplish something against them now?” Goldfarb asked.
“We add the radar, which is your wicket, and we add a good deal of speed, which is always an asset,” Roundbush said. “Put them together and I’d say they improve our chances all the way up to bloody poor.”
As a joke, that wouldn’t have been bad. The trouble was, Roundbush wasn’t joking. Goldfarb had tracked Lizard aircraft on ground-based radar down at Dover before the aliens openly revealed their presence. They’d gone so high and fast, he and everybody else had wondered if they were real or defects in the mechanism. He and everybody else knew the answer to that now.
Roundbush said, “You’ve flown airborne radar before, haven’t you? Yes, of course you have; that’s why Group Captain Hipple wanted you as part of the group. Don’t mind me. I’m a silly ass tonight.”
“That’s right.” Goldfarb hoped the pilot would realize he was agreeing about his experience, not the later parenthetical comment. He’d been in charge of a set flown in a Lancaster to see if the thing could be done. “Rather more room to fit the set in a bomber fuselage than in the Meteor.”
“Rather,” Roundbush said, and drained his glass.
Goldfarb finished his bitter, too, then held up a hand to buy a round in turn. That was inviolable pub custom: two men together, two rounds; four men together, four rounds; eight men together and they’d all go home half blind.
Stella took her time about noticing a mere radarman, but Goldfarb’s half-a-crown spent as well as anyone else’s. When she went off to get change, though, she didn’t put as much into her walk for him as she had for Roundbush.
The pilot said, “We’d be better off still if we had guided rockets like the Lizards’. Then we’d knock their planes out of the sky at twenty miles, as they can with us. Once we’re inside gun range, we have an almost decent chance, but getting there, as the saying goes, is half the fun.”
“Yes, I know about that,” Goldfarb said. The Lizards had fired radar-homing rockets at his Lanc. Turning off the radar made them miss, but a turned-off radar was of even less use than no radar at all, because it added weight and made the aircraft that carried it slower and less maneuverable.
“Good. One less thing to have to brief you about.” Roundbush poured down his pint, apparently in one long swallow, then waved to get Stella’s attention. “We’ll just have ourselves another one before we toddle on back to base.”
Another one turned into another two: Goldfarb insisted on buying a matching round. Part of that was pub custom. Another part was a conscious effort on his part to give the lie to Jews’ reputation for stinginess. His parents, products of a harsher world than England, had drilled into him that he should never let himself become a spectacle for the gentiles.
Pedaling back to the airbase with four pints of best bitter in him gave a whole new meaning to Roundbush’s mock-aristocratic “toddling.” He was glad he wasn’t trying to drive a car. He expected to have a thick head come morning, but nothing that would keep him from doing his work, and certainly nothing that would keep him from flying the next afternoon.
The headache with which he did wake up wasn’t what left him abstracted when he headed for the Nissen hut Hipple’s team shared with the meteorological staff. He had his mind too focused on the flight ahead to be as efficient as he might have been in trying to decipher the secrets of a captured Lizard radar, though.
Basil Roundbush had had more than four pints the night before-how many more, Goldfarb didn’t know-but seemed fresh as a daisy. He was whistling a tune the radarman hadn’t heard. Flight Lieutenant Maurice Kennan looked up from a sheaf of three-view drawings and said, “That’s as off-key as it is off-color, which is saying something.”
“Thank you, sir,” Roundbush said cheerfully, which made Kennan return to his drawings in a hurry. If Roundbush hadn’t been a flier, he would have made a masterful psychological warfare officer.
Goldfarb’s pretense of its being a normal day broke down about ten o’clock, when Leo Horton, a fellow radarman, nudged him in the ribs and whispered, “You lucky sod.” After that, he was only pretending to work.
An hour or so later, Roundbush walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. “What say we go don our shining armor and make sure our steed is ready to ride?” From another man, the Arthurian language would have sounded asinine. He was not only a spirit blithe enough to carry it off without self-consciousness, he’d fought a great many aerial jousts already. Goldfarb nodded and got up from his desk.
The flight suit of leather and fur was swelteringly hot in the bright sunshine of an English summer’s day, but Goldfarb zipped zippers and fastened catches without complaint. Three or four miles straight up and it wouldn’t be summery any more. For that matter, the Meteor surely had a higher ceiling than the trudging Lanc in which he’d flown before.
In the Lancaster, he’d tended the radar in the cavernous space of the bomb bay. In the new two-seater version of the Meteor, he sat behind the pilot in a stretched cockpit. The radar set itself was mounted behind and below him in the fuselage; only the controls and the screens were where he could get at them. If something went
wrong with the unit, he’d have to wait till he was back on the ground to fiddle with it.
Groundcrew men pulled the plane out of its sandbagged, camouflaged revetment and onto the runway. Goldfarb had heard jet engines a great number of times, but being in an aircraft whose engines were being started was a new experience, and one he could have done without: it reminded him of nothing so much as taking up residence inside a dentist’s drill. “Bit noisy, what?” Roundbush bawled through the interphone.
The moment the Meteor began to taxi, Goldfarb realized he’d traded a brewery horse for a thoroughbred. The engine noise grew even more appalling, but the fighter sprang into the air and climbed as if it were shot from a boy’s catapult.
So Goldfarb thought, at any rate, till Basil Roundbush said, “This Mark is on the underpowered side, but they’re working on new engines that should really pep up the performance.”
“Overwhelming enough for me already, thanks,” the radarman said. ‘What’s our ceiling in this aircraft?”
“Just over forty thousand feet,” Roundbush replied. “We’ll be there in less than half an hour, and we’ll be able to see quite a long ways, I expect.”
“I expect you’re right,” Goldfarb said, breathing rubbery air through his oxygen mask. The Lancaster in which he’d flown before had taken almost twice as long to climb a little more than half as high, and Roundbush was complaining about this machine’s anemia! In a way, that struck Goldfarb as absurd. In another way, given what the pilot would have to face, it seemed only reasonable.
The Meteor banked gently. Through puffs of fluffy white cloud, Goldfarb peered out through the Perspex of the cockpit at the green patchwork quilt of the English countryside. “Good show this isn’t a few months ago,” Roundbush remarked casually. “Time was when the ack-ack crews would start shooting at the mere sound of a jet engine, thinking it had to belong to the Lizards. Some of our Pioneers and Meteors took shrapnel damage on that account, though none of them was shot down.”
“Urk,” Goldfarb said; perhaps luckily, that hadn’t occurred to him. Down in Dover, the antiaircraft crew had opened up at the roar of jets without a second thought.
“How’s the radar performing?” Roundbush asked, reminding him of why they were flying the mission.
He checked the cathode-ray tubes. Strange to think he could see farther and in greater detail with them than with his eyes, especially when, from this airy eyrie, he seemed to be the king of infinite space, with the whole world set out below for his inspection. “Everything seems to be performing as it should,” he said cautiously. “I have a couple of blips that, by their height and speed, are our own aircraft. Could you fly a southerly course, to let me search for Lizard machines?”
“Changing course to one-eight-zero,” Roundbush said, obliging as a Victorian carriage driver acknowledging his toff of a master’s request to convey him to Boodle’s. Like a proper fighter pilot, he peered ahead and in all directions as the Meteor swung through its turn. “I don’t see anything.”
Goldfarb didn’t see anything, either; his screens remained serenely blank. In a way, that was disappointing. In another way, it was a relief: if he could see the Lizards, they assuredly could also see him-and Roundbush had made no bones about their planes’ remaining far superior to the Meteor.
Then, off in the electronic distance, he thought he detected something-and then, an instant later, the radar screens went crazy with noise, as if the aurora borealis had decided to dance on them. “I’m getting interference,” Goldfarb said urgently. “I spied what seemed to be a Lizard plane, right at the edge of where the set could reach, and then everything turned to hash-which means he likely detected me, too.”
“Which also means we’re apt to have a rocket or two pay us a visit in the not too distant future,” Roundbush said. “I don’t propose to wait around for them, all things considered.”
He threw the Meteor into a dive that left Goldfarb’s stomach some miles behind and thousands of feet above the aircraft. He gulped and did his best to keep his breakfast down; vomiting while you were wearing oxygen gear was not a good idea. Roundbush didn’t make it easy, twisting the plane from side to side in evasive maneuvers violent enough to make the wings groan in protest. Goldfarb suspected he was stretching the Meteor’s performance envelope, and hoped it had enough stretch in it.
The radarman had shut down his set to keep any rockets from homing on its signal. Now he was just a passenger, useless weight, as Roundbush shed altitude. The ground rushed up as if thrown at him. Not knowing whether the Lizards had fired and missed or contented themselves with simply scrambling his signal made the descent all the more harrowing.
The first thing he said when the nose wheel touched down at Bruntingthorpe was, “Thank you.” The next thing was, “We have a bit more work ahead of us, haven’t we?”
Teerts was getting quite handy with the eating sticks the Nipponese used. He shoveled rice with bits of raw fish into his mouth, hardly spilling a grain or a morsel. The Big Uglies were feeding him better than they had when they first took him prisoner. He shuddered. They could hardly feed him worse.
Hishashi discovered a thin, reddish piece of pickled ginger. He picked it up, turned both eye turrets toward it. Not so long ago, he’d been a killercraft pilot, a proud male of the conquest fleet of the Race. Now, thanks to bad luck, he was a prisoner in an empire of Big Uglies convinced that no worthy warrior ever let himself be taken prisoner. To help squeeze all they could out of him, they’d addicted him to this perfidious Tosevite herb.
With a convulsive jerk of his hand, he popped the piece of ginger into his mouth. He went rooting through the bowl with the eating sticks, looking for others. He found them and gobbled them up. The Nipponese cook had been unusually generous. He wondered what that meant; the Nipponese were not given to generosity unless they expected to realize something from it.
Then, as the ginger took effect, he stopped worrying about why the Nipponese had given it to him. That they had was enough. He felt smart enough to outwit every Big Ugly interrogator and nuclear physicist, strong enough to bend the bars of his Tokyo prison cell and escape the life of torment that he led.
Those were only feelings. He knew it all too well. The interrogators and physicists had drained him dry; everything he’d known about splitting atoms, they now knew. They’d known much of it already. The Russkis had already built a bomb. How the Nipponese gloated over that! How they strained every fiber to get one of their own!
Could Teerts have torn out the bars of his cell, he would have. Thinking he could wasn’t enough to make it real. He’d tried, the first few times ginger had made him feel like a machine. In somber fact, he was just a male of the Race, and steel bars defeated him.
Usually when they fed him so much ginger, an interrogation was in the offing. The Nipponese liked to question him when the herb made his tongue loose and lively. He waited for Major Okamoto, his interpreter, interrogator, and occasional tormentor, to come down the hall. But Okamoto did not come.
From the top of the lift ginger gave him, Teerts slid into the trough of despair that followed. Just as he started to curl up in the farthest corner of his cell with the blanket drawn up over him both for warmth and to cut himself off from the unpleasant outside world, heavy Tosevite footsteps came echoing down the corridor.
The jailer unlocked his cell. “Come along,” Major Okamoto said in Teerts’ language. By now, Teerts paid little attention to his accent.
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Teerts said, but Okamoto had to shout at him before he would get up. The silent guard who always accompanied the major gestured with his bayoneted rifle for Teerts to precede him.
Before they left the prison, Okamoto decked Teerts in a conical straw hat like the ones some Nipponese wore, and also gave him trousers and tunic. He looked ridiculous, but that was not the point: the point was to keep him from being spotted from the air or by the Race’s reconnaissance satellites.
The beast-drawn wagon that
waited outside did not head off toward the nuclear physics laboratory, as it usually did. Instead, it took an unfamiliar path through the narrow, crowded streets of Tokyo. Teerts asked, “Where are we going, superior sir?”
“To the train station, and then on to Kobe,” Okamoto answered. “Dr. Nishina does not think you can tell him any more of use in his plutonium bomb project, so the naval aviators will resume their questioning of you.”
“I see,” Teerts said dully. Now something more than the absence of ginger weighed down his spirits. The scientists, on the whole, had been restrained when he didn’t know something. The military males-He shuddered.
The train station was packed with Nipponese, some in gowns, some in shirts and trousers, many in the uniforms of army and navy. Using a separate service for the water struck Teerts as absurd, but Tosev 3 had oceans where Home had small seas, so perhaps there was some justification for the idea.
Most of the train was even more crowded than the station as a whole, but Teerts, Major Okamoto, and the stolid guard had a car all to themselves, with tea and food already laid on. Okamoto did not object to Teerts’ feeding himself. His rice had ginger in it, which buoyed his spirits.
A jerk said the train was in motion. Puffs of smoky steam flew from the engine. Teerts reckoned the coal-burner an unbelievably filthy machine, but on such matters the Big Uglies did not solicit his opinion.
Above the racket of the engine, above the clicking of the cars it pulled over the rails, came another sound, one Teerts knew intimately: the high, screaming wail of a turbofan engine. Major Okamoto looked up in alarm. “Air raid!” he shouted, just as bombs and cannon fire began chewing up the train.
Shells punched through the roof of the car as if it were made of tissue. A bomb exploded right next to it. Teerts felt as if he were caught in the egg from which all earthquakes hatched. Glass sprayed around him. The car derailed and overturned.
When the crashing and the spinning stopped, he found himself sitting on what had been the roof. “I’m alive,” he exclaimed, and then, even more surprised, “I’m not hurt.” Major Okamoto and the silent, stolid guard lay on the roof, too, both of them bleeding and unconscious.
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