Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

He hoped Ludmila was all right. They’d first met in the Ukraine, where she’d plucked him and his gunner (he hoped Georg Schultz was all right, too) off a collective farm and taken them to Moscow so they could explain to the Red Army brass how they’d managed to kill a Lizard panzer. He’d written to her after that-she had some German, he a little Russian-but got no answer.

  Then they’d come together at Berchtesgaden, where Hitler had pinned on him the German Cross in gold (a medal so ugly he wore only the ribbon these days) and she’d flown in Molotov for consultation with, the Fuhrer. He smiled slowly. That had been as magical a week as he’d ever known.

  But what now? he wondered. Ludmila had flown back to the Soviet Union, where the NKVD would not look kindly upon her for sleeping with a Nazi… any more than the Gestapo was pleased with him for sleeping with a Red. “Screw ’em all,” he muttered, which drew a quizzical glance from Rolf Wittman. Jager did not explain.

  A motorcycle came put-putting slowly down the road, its headlight dimmed almost to extinction by a blackout slit cap. With the Lizards’ detectors, even that could be dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving a winding French road in pitch darkness.

  The motorcycle driver spotted the panzers off under the trees. He stopped, throttled down, and called, “Anyone know where I can find Colonel Heinrich Jager?”

  “Here I am,” Jager said, standing up. “Was ist los?”

  “I have here orders for you, Colonel.” The driver pulled them out of his tunic pocket.

  Jager unfolded the paper, stooped down and held it in front of the motorcycle headlamp so he could read it. “Scheisse,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been recalled. They just put me back in frontline service, and now I’ve been recalled.”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver agreed. “I am ordered to take you back with me.”

  “But why?” Jager said. “It makes no sense. Here I am an experienced fighter for Fuhrer and Vaterland against the Lizards. But what good will I do in this Hechingen place? I’ve scarcely even heard of it.”

  But he had heard of it, and fairly recently, too. Where? When? He stiffened as memory came. Hechingen was where Hitler had said he was sending the explosive metal. Without another word, Jager walked over to his Panther, got on the radio, and turned command over to the regimental lieutenant-colonel. Then he slung his pack onto his shoulders, went back to the motorcycle, climbed on behind the driver, and headed back toward Germany.

  II

  Ludmila Gorbunova did not care for Moscow. She was from Kiev, and thought the Soviet capital drab and dull. Her impression of it was not improved by the endless grilling she’d had from the NKVD. She’d never imagined the mere sight of green collar tabs could reduce her to fearful incoherence, but it did.

  And, she knew, things could have been worse. The chekists were treating her with kid gloves because she’d flown Comrade Molotov, second in the Soviet Union only to the Great Stalin, and a man who loathed flying, to Germany and brought him home in one piece. Besides, the rodina-the motherland-needed combat pilots. She’d stayed alive through most of a year against the Nazis and several months against the Lizards. That should have given her value above and beyond what she got for ferrying Molotov around.

  Whether it did, however, remained to be seen. A lot of very able, seemingly very valuable people had disappeared over the past few years, denounced as wreckers or traitors to the Soviet Union or sometimes just vanished with no explanation at all, as if they had suddenly ceased to exist…

  The door to the cramped little room (cramped, yes, but infinitely preferable to a cell in the Lefortovo prison) in which she sat came open. The NKVD man who came in wore three crimson oblongs on his collar tabs. Ludmila bounced to her feet. “Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” she said, saluting.

  He returned the salute, the first time that had happened since the NKVD started in on her. “Comrade Senior Lieutenant,” he acknowledged. “I am Boris Lidov.” She blinked in surprise; none of her questioners had bothered giving his name till now, either. Lidov looked more like a schoolmaster than an NKVD man, not that that meant anything. But he surprised her again, saying, “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes, thank you very much, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” she answered-quickly, before he changed his mind. The German attack had deranged the Soviet distribution system, that of the Lizards all but destroyed it. These days, tea was rare and precious.

  Well, she thought, the NKVD will have it if anyone does. And sure enough, Lidov stuck his head out the door and bawled a request. Within moments, someone fetched him a tray with two gently steaming glasses. He took it, set it on the table in front of Ludmila. “Help yourself,” he, said. “Choose whichever you wish; neither one is drugged, I assure you.”

  He didn’t need to assure her; that he did so made her suspicious again. But she took a glass and drank. Her tongue found nothing in it but tea and sugar. She sipped again, savoring the taste and the warmth. “Thank you, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel. It’s very good,” she said.

  Lidov made an indolent gesture, as If to say she didn’t need to thank him for anything so small. Then he said idly, as if making casual conversation, “You know, I met your Major Jager-no, you’ve said he’s Colonel Jager now, correct? — your Colonel Jager, I should say, after you brought him here to Moscow last summer.”

  “Ah,” Ludmila said, that being the most noncommittal noise she could come up with. She decided it was not enough.

  “Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, as I have said before, he is not my colonel by any means.”

  “I do not necessarily condemn,” Lidov said, steepling his fingers. “The ideology of the fascist state is corrupt, not the German people. And”-he coughed dryly-“the coming of the Lizards has shown that progressive economic systems, capitalist and socialist alike, must band together lest we all fall under the oppression of the ancient system wherein the relationship is slave to master, not worker to boss.”

  “Yes,” Ludmila said eagerly. The last thing she wanted to do was argue about the dialectic of history with an NKVD man, especially when his interpretation seemed to her advantage.

  Lidov went on, “Further, your Colonel Jager helped perform a service for the people of the Soviet Union, as he may have mentioned to you.”

  “No, I’m afraid he didn’t. I’m sorry, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, but we talked very little about the war when we saw each other in Germany. We-” Ludmila felt her face heat. She knew what Lidov had to be thinking. Unfortunately-from her point of view-he was right.

  He looked down his long, straight nose at her. “You like Germans well, don’t you?” be said sniffily. “This Jager in Berchtesgaden, and you attached his gunner”-he pulled out a scrap of paper, checked a name on it-“Georg Schultz, da, to the ground crew at your airstrip.”

  “He is a better mechanic than anyone else at the airstrip. Germans understand machinery better than we do, I think. But as far as I am concerned, he is only a mechanic,” Ludmila insisted.

  “He is a German. They are both Germans.” So much for Lidov’s words about the solidarity of peoples with progressive economic systems. His flat, hard tone made Ludmila think of a trip to Siberia on an unheated cattle car, or of a bullet in the back of the neck. The NKVD man went on, “It is likely that Comrade Molotov will dispense with the services of a pilot who forms such un-Soviet attachments.”

  “I am sorry to hear that, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel,” Ludmila said, though she knew Molotov would have been glad to dispense with the services of any pilot, given his attitude about flying. But she insisted, “I have no attachments to Georg Schultz save those of the struggle against the Lizards.”

  “And to Colonel Jager?” Lidov said with the air of a man calling checkmate. Ludmila did not answer, she knew she was checkmated. The lieutenant-colonel spoke as if pronouncing sentence: “Because of this conduct of yours, you are to be returned to your former duties without promotion. Dismissed, Comrade Senior Lieutenant.”

  Ludmila had been braced for ten years in the gulag
and another five of internal exile. She needed a moment to take in what she’d just heard. She jumped to her feet. “I serve the Soviet state, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel!” Whether you believe me or not, she added to herself.

  “Prepare yourself for immediate departure for the airport,” Lidov said, as if her mere presence polluted Moscow. An NKVD flunky must have been listening outside the door or to a concealed microphone, for in under half a minute a fellow in green collar tabs brought in a canvas bag full of her worldly goods.

  Before long, a troika was taking her from the Kremlin to the airport on the edge of Moscow. The sleigh’s runners and the hooves of the three horses that drew it kicked up snow gone from white to gray thanks to city soot. Only when her beloved little U-2 biplane came into view on the runway did she realize she’d been returned to this duty, which she wanted more than any other, as if it were a punishment. She chewed on that a long time, even after she was in the air.

  “I’m bloody lost,” David Goldfarb said as he pedaled his RAF bicycle through the countryside south of Leicester. The radarman came to an intersection. He looked for signs to tell him where he was-and looked in vain, because the signs taken down in 1940 to hinder a feared German invasion had never gone back up.

  He was trying to get to the Research and Development Test Flying Aerodrome at Bruntingthorpe, to which he’d been ordered to report. South from the village of Peatling Magna, his directions read. The only trouble was, nobody had bothered to tell him (for all he knew, nobody was aware) two roads ran south from Peatling Magna. He’d taken the right-hand track, and was beginning to regret it.

  Peatling Magna hadn’t looked magna enough to boast two roads when he rolled through it; he wondered if there could possibly be a Peatling Minima, and, if so, whether it was visible to the naked eye.

  Ten minutes of steady pedaling brought him into another village. He looked around hopefully for anything resembling an aerodrome, but nothing he saw matched that description. A matronly woman in a scarf and a heavy wool coat was trudging down the street. “Begging your pardon, madam,” he called to her, “but is this Bruntingthorpe?”

  The woman’s head whipped around-his London accent automatically made him out to be a stranger. She relaxed, a little, when she saw he was in RAF dark blue and thus had an excuse for poking his good-sized nose into a place where he didn’t belong. But even though she used the broader vowels of the East Midlands, her voice was sharp as she answered, “Bruntingthorpe? I should say not, young man. This is Peatling Parva. Bruntingthorpe lies down that road.” She pointed east.

  “Thank you, madam,” Goldfarb said gravely. He bent low over his bicycle, rode away fast so she wouldn’t hear him start to snicker. Not Peatling Minima-Peatling Parva. The name fit; it had looked a pretty parva excuse for a village. Now, though, he was on the right track and-he looked at his watch-near enough on time that he could blame his tardiness on the train’s getting into Leicester late, which it had.

  He hadn’t gone far toward Bruntingthorpe when he heard a screaming roar, saw an airplane streak across the sky at what seemed an impossible speed. Alarm and fury coursed through him-had he come here just in time to see the Lizards bomb and wreck the aerodrome?

  Then he played in his mind the film of the aircraft he’d just seen. After the Lizards destroyed the radar station at Dover, he’d been an aircraft spotter the old-fashioned way, with binoculars and field telephone, for a while. He recognized the Lizards’ fighters and fighter-bombers. This aircraft, even if it flew on jets, didn’t match any of them. Either they’d come up with something new or the plane was English.

  Hope replaced anger. Where was he more likely to find English jet aircraft than at a research and development aerodrome? He wondered why the powers that be wanted him there. He’d find out soon.

  The village of Bruntingthorpe was no more prepossessing than either of the Peatlings. Not far away, though, a collection of tents, corrugated-iron Nissen huts, and macadamized runways marred the gently rolling fields that surrounded the hamlets. A soldier with a tin hat and a Sten gun demanded to see Goldfarb’s papers when he pedaled up to the barbed-wire fence and gate around the RAF facility.

  He surrendered them, but could not help remarking, “Seems a fairish waste of time, if anyone wants to know. Not bloody likely I’m a Lizard in disguise, is it?”

  “Never can tell, chum,” the soldier answered. “Besides, you might be a Jerry in disguise, and we’re not dead keen on that even if the match there won’t be played to a finish.”

  “Can’t say I blame you.” Goldfarb’s parents had got out of Russian-ruled Poland to escape pogroms against the Jews. By all accounts, the Nazis’ pogroms after they conquered Poland had been a hundred times worse, bad enough for the Jews there to make common cause with the Lizards against the Germans. Now, from the reports that leaked out, the Lizards were beginning to make things tough on the Jews. Goldfarb sighed. Being a Jew wasn’t easy anywhere.

  The sentry opened the gate, waved him through. He rode over to the nearest Nissen hut, got off his bicycle, pushed down the kickstand, and went into the hut. Several RAF men were gathered round a large table there, studying some drawings by the light of a paraffin lamp hung overhead. “Yes?” one of them said.

  Goldfarb stiffened to attention: the casual questioner, though just a couple of inches over five feet tall, wore the four narrow stripes of a group captain. Saluting, Goldfarb gave his name, specialization, and service number, then added, “Reporting as ordered sir!”

  The officer returned the salute. “Good to have you with us, Goldfarb. We’ve had excellent reports of you, and we’re confident you’ll make a valuable member of the team. I am Group Captain Fred Hipple; I shall be your commanding officer. My speciality is jet propulsion. Here we have Wing Commander Peary, Flight Lieutenant Kennan, and Flight Officer Roundbush.”

  The junior officers all towered over Hipple, but he dominated nonetheless. He was a dapper little fellow who held himself very erect; he had slicked-down wavy hair, a closely trimmed mustache, and heavy eyebrows. He spoke with almost professional precision: “I am told that you have been flying patrols aboard a radar-equipped Lancaster bomber in an effort to detect Lizard aircraft prior to their reaching our shores.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s correct,” Goldfarb said.

  “Capital. We shall make great use of your experience, I assure you. What we are engaged in here, Radarman, is developing a jet-propelled fighter aeroplane to be similarly equipped with radar, thus facilitating the acquisition and tracking of targets and, it is to be hoped, their destruction.”

  “That’s-splendid, sir.” Goldfarb had always thought of radar as a defensive weapon, one to use to detect the enemy and send properly armed planes after him. But to mount it on a fighter already formidably armed in its own right… He smiled. This was a project in which he would gladly take part.

  Flight Officer Roundbush shook his head. He was as big and blond and blocky as Hipple was spare and dark. He said, “It’d be a lot more splendid if we could make the bloody thing fit in the space we have for it.”

  “Which is, at the moment, essentially nil,” Ripple said with a rueful nod. “The jet fighter you may have seen taking off a few moments ago, that little Gloster Pioneer, is not what one would call lavishly equipped with room. It was, in fact, in the air more than a year before the Lizards came.” Bitterness creased his face. “As I had produced a working jet engine as far back as 1937, I find the delay unfortunate, but no help for it now. When the Lizards descended, the Pioneer, though intended only as an experimental aircraft, was rushed into production to give us as much of an equalizer as was possible.”

  “Might as well be tanks,” Roundbush murmured. Both the German invasion of France and the fighting in the North African desert had shown severe deficiencies in British armor, but the same old obsolescent models kept getting made because they did work, after a fashion, and England had no time to tool up to build anything better.

  Group Captain Hipple shook
his head. “It’s not as bad as that, Basil. We have managed to get the Meteor off the ground, after all.” He turned back to Goldfarb. “The Meteor is more a proper fighter than the Pioneer. The latter carries a single jet engine placed in back of the cockpit, whereas the former has two, of an improved design, mounted on the wings. The improvement in performance is considerable.”

  “We also have a considerable production program laid on for the Meteor,” Flight Lieutenant Kennan said. “With luck, we should be able to put large numbers of jet fighters into the air by this time next year.”

  “Yes, that’s so, Maurice,” Hipple agreed. “Of all the great powers, we and the Japanese have proved most fortunate, in that the Lizards did not invade either island nation. From the depths of space, I suppose we seemed too small to be worth troubling over. We’ve endured a worse blitz than the Jerries gave us, but life does go on despite a blitz. You should know that, eh, Goldfarb?”

  “Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said. “It got a bit lively at Dover now and again, but we came through.” Though only a first-generation Englishman, he had a knack for understatement.

  “Exactly.” Hipple’s nod was vehement, as If Goldfarb had said something important. The group captain went on, “As Flight Lieutenant Kennan and I have noted, our industrial capacity is still respectable, and we shall be able to get considerable numbers of Meteors airborne within a relatively short period. What point to it, however, if,once airborne, they are shot down again in short order?”

  “Which is where you come in, Goldfarb,” Wing Commander Peary said. He was a slim fellow of medium height with sandy hair starting to go gray; his startling bass voice seemed better suited to a man of twice his bulk.

  “Exactly,” Hipple said again. “Julian-the wing commander-means we need a chap with practical experience in airborne radar to help us plan its installation in Meteors as quickly as possible. Our pilots must be able to detect the enemy’s presence at a distance comparable to that at which he can ‘see’ us. D’you follow?”