Wearing His Majesty’s uniform once more felt most welcome to David Goldfarb. The ribbon of the Military Medal, in the colors of the Union Jack, held a new place of pride just above his left breast pocket. He’d imagined the only way a radarman could win a ground combat medal was to have the Jerries or the Lizards invade England. Going to Poland as a commando hadn’t been what he’d had in mind.
Bruntingthorpe had changed in the weeks he’d been away. More and more Pioneer and Meteor jet fighters sheltered in revetments. The place was becoming a working air base rather than an experimental station. But Fred Hipple’s team for evaluating Lizard engines and radars still worked here—and, Goldfarb had not been surprised to discover on his return, still shared a Nissen hut with the meteorologists. The one they had occupied was replaced, but somebody else worked in it these days.
He traded greetings with his comrades as he went in and got ready to go to work. The stuff brewing in the pot above the spirit lamp wasn’t exactly tea, but with plenty of honey it was drinkable. He poured himself a cup, adulterated it to taste, and went over to the Lizard radar unit.
It hadn’t languished while he’d been performing deeds of derring-do and speaking Yiddish. Another radarman, an impossibly young-looking fellow named Leo Horton, had made a good deal of progress on it in the interim.
“Morning to you,” Horton said in a nasal Devonshire accent.
“Morning,” Goldfarb agreed. He sipped the not-quite-tea, hoping this morning’s batch would carry a jolt. You couldn’t gauge that in advance these days. Sometimes you could drink it by the gallon and do nothing but put your kidneys through their paces; sometimes half a cup would open your eyes wide as hangar doors. It all depended on what went into the witches’ brew on any given day.
“I think I’ve made sense of some more of the circuitry,” Horton said. He was frightfully clever, with a theoretical background in electronics and physics Goldfarb couldn’t come close to matching. He also had a fine head for beer and, perhaps not least because he made them feel motherly, was cutting quite a swath through the barmaids up in Leicester. He reminded Goldfarb of an improved model of Jerome Jones, which was plenty to make him feel inadequate.
But business was business. “Good show,” Goldfarb said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“You see this set of circuits here?” Horton pointed to an area of the disassembled radar not far from the magnetron. “I’m pretty sure it controls the strength of the signal.”
“You know, I suspected that before I got drafted away from here,” Goldfarb said. “I didn’t have the chance to test it, though. What’s your evidence?”
Horton opened a fat notebook with a cover almost the exact dark blue of his RAF uniform. “Here, look at these oscilloscope readings when I shunt power through this lead here—” He pointed again to show which one he meant.
“I think you’re right,” Goldfarb said. “And look at the amplification.” He whistled softly. “We wouldn’t just be promoted—we’d be bloody knighted if we found out how the Lizards do this and we could fit it into our own sets.”
“Too true, but good luck,” Horton replied. “I can tell you what those circuits do, but I will be damned if I have the slightest notion of how they do it. If you took one of our Lancs and landed it at a Royal Flying Corps base in 1914—not that you could, because no runways then were anywhere near long enough—the mechanics then would stand a better chance of understanding the aircraft and all its systems than we do of making sense of—this.” He jabbed a thumb at the Lizard radar.
“It’s not quite so bad as that,” Goldfarb said. “Group Captain Hipple and his crew have made good progress with the engines.”
“Oh, indeed. But he’d already figured out the basic principles involved.”
“We have the basic principles of radar,” Goldfarb protested.
“But their radar is further ahead of ours than their jet engines are,” Horton said. “It’s just the quality of the metallurgy that drives the group captain mad. Here, the Lizards are using a whole different technology to achieve their results: no valves, everything so small the circuits only come clear under the microscope. Figuring out what anything does is a triumph; figuring out how it does it is a wholly different question.”
“Don’t I know it,” Goldfarb said ruefully. “There have been days—and plenty of ’em—when I’d sooner have kicked that bleeding radar out onto the rubbish pitch than worked on it.”
“Ah, but you have managed to get away for a bit.” Horton pointed to the Military Medal ribbon on Goldfarb’s chest. “I wish I’d had the chance to try to earn one of those.”
Remembering terror and flight, Goldfarb started to say he would have been just as glad not to have had the opportunity. But that wasn’t really true. Getting his cousin Moishe and his family out of Poland had been worth doing; he knew only pride that he’d been able to help there.
The other thing he noted, with a small shock, was the edge of genuine envy in Horton’s voice. The new radarman’s savvy had intimidated him ever since he got back to Bruntingthorpe. Finding out that Horton admired him was like a tonic. He remembered the gap that had existed back at Dover between those who went up to do battle in the air and those who stayed behind and fought their war with electrons and phosphors.
But Goldfarb had crossed to the far side of that gap. Even before he went to Poland, he’d gone aloft in a Lancaster to test the practicability of airborne radar sets. He’d taken Lizard fire then, too, but returned safely. Ground combat, though, was something else again. If one of those Lizard rockets had struck the Lanc, he never would have seen the alien who killed him. Ground combat was personal. He’d shot people and Lizards in Lodz and watched them fall. He still had nasty dreams about it.
Leo Horton was still waiting for an answer. Goldfarb said, “In the long run, what we do here will have more effect on how the war ends than anything anyone accomplishes gallivanting about with a bloody knife between his teeth.”
“You go gallivanting about with a knife between your teeth and it’ll turn bloody in short order, that’s for certain,” Horton said.
Flight Officer Basil Roundbush came in and poured himself a cup of ersatz tea. His broad, ruddy face lit up in a smile. “Not bad today, by Jove,” he said.
“Probably does taste better after you run it through that soup strainer you’ve got on your upper lip,” Goldfarb said.
“You’re a cheeky bugger, you know that?” Roundbush took a step toward Goldfarb, as if in anger. Goldfarb needed a distinct effort of will to stand his ground; he gave away three or four inches and a couple of stone in weight. Not only that, Roundbush wore a virtual constellation of pot metal and bright ribbons on his chest. He’d flown Spitfires against the Luftwaffe in what then looked to be Britain’s darkest hour.
“Just a joke, sir,” Horton said hastily.
“You’re new here,” Roundbush said, his voice amused. “I know it’s a joke, and what’s more, Goldfarb there knows I know. Isn’t that right, Goldfarb?” His expression defied the radarman to deny it.
“Yes, sir, I think so,” Goldfarb answered, “although one can’t be too certain with a man who grows such a vile caricature of a mustache.”
Leo Horton looked alarmed. Roundbush threw back his head and roared laughter. “You are a cheeky bugger, and you skewered me as neatly there as if you were Errol Flynn in one of those Hollywood cinemas about pirates.” He assumed a fencing stance and made cut-and-thrust motions that showed he had some idea of what he was about. He suddenly stopped and held up one finger. “I have it! Best way to rid ourselves of the Lizards would be to challenge them to a duel. Foil, epée, saber—makes no difference. Our champion against theirs, winner take all.”
From one of the tables strewn with jet engine parts, Wing Commander Julian Peary called, “One of these days, Basil, you really should learn the difference between simplifying a problem and actually solving it.”
“Yes, sir,” Roundbush said, not at all respectfully. Then
he turned wistful: “It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it, to take them on in a contest where we might have the advantage.”
“Something to that,” Peary admitted.
Leo Horton bent over a scrap of paper, sketched rapidly. In a minute or two, he held up a creditable drawing of a Lizard wearing a long-snouted knight’s helmet (complete with plume) and holding a broadsword. Prepare to die, Earthling varlet, the alien proclaimed in a cartoon-style speech bubble.
“That’s not bad,” Roundbush said. “We ought to post it on a board here.”
“That’s quite good,” Goldfarb said. “You should think of doing portrait sketches for the girls.”
Horton eyed him admiringly. “No flies on you. I’ve done that a few times. It works awfully well.”
“Unfair competition, that’s what I call it,” Basil Roundbush grumped. “I shall write my MP and have him propose a bill classing it with all other forms of poaching.”
As helpful as he’d been before, Peary said, “You couldn’t poach an egg, and I wouldn’t give long odds about your writing, either.”
About then, Goldfarb noticed Fred Hipple standing in the doorway and listening to the back-and-forth. Roundbush saw the diminutive group captain at the same moment. Whatever hot reply he’d been about to make died in his throat with a gurgle. Hipple ran a forefinger along his thin brown mustache. “A band of brothers, one and all,” he murmured as he came inside.
“Sir, if we can’t rag one another, half the fun goes out of life,” Roundbush said.
“For you, Basil, more than half, unless I’m sadly mistaken,” Hipple said, which made the flight officer blush like a child. But Hipple’s voice held no reproof; he went on, “So long as it doesn’t interfere with the quality of our work, I see no reason for the badinage not to continue.”
“Ah, capital,” Roundbush said in relief. “That means I can include my distinguished gray-haired superior in that letter to my MP; perhaps I can arrange to have his tongue ruled a noxious substance and shipped out of the country, or at least possibly rabid and so subject to six months’ quarantine.”
Julian Peary was not about to let himself be upstaged: “If we inquire at all closely into what your tongue has been doing, Basil old boy, I dare say we’d find it needs more quarantine than a mere six months.” Roundbush had turned pink at Hippie’s gibe; now he went brick-red.
“Torpedoed at the waterline,” Goldfarb whispered to Leo Horton. “He’s sinking fast.” The other radarman grinned and nodded.
Hipple turned to the two of them. Goldfarb was afraid he’d overheard, but he just said, “How are we coming at fitting a radar set into the Meteor fuselage, gentlemen?”
“As long as we don’t fly with fuel tanks in there, we’ll be fine, sir,” Goldfarb answered, deadpan. Hipple gave him a fishy stare, then laughed—warily—and nodded. Goldfarb went on, “Horton, though, has made some exciting finds about which part of the circuitry controls signal amplitude.”
He’d expected that to excite Hipple, who had been almost as eager to learn about radar as he had been to tinker with his beloved jet engines. But Hipple just asked, “Is it something we can apply immediately?”
“No, sir,” Horton answered. “I know what they do, but not how they do it.”
“Then we’ll just have to leave it,” Hipple said. “For now, we must be as utilitarian as possible.”
Goldfarb and Horton exchanged glances. That didn’t sound like the Fred Hipple they’d come to know. “What’s up, sir?” Goldfarb asked. Roundbush and the other RAF officers who worked directly under the group captain also paid close attention.
But Hipple just said, “Time is not running in our favor at the moment,” and buried his nose in an engineering drawing.
“Time for what?” Goldfarb asked Horton in a tiny voice. The other radarman shrugged. One more thing to worry about, Goldfarb thought, and went back to work.
Except for being illuminated only by sunlight, Dr. Hiram Sharp’s office in Ogden didn’t seem much different from any other Jens Larssen had visited. Dr. Sharp himself, a round little man with gold-rimmed glasses, looked at Jens over the tops of them and said, “Son, you’ve got the clap.”
“I knew that, thanks,” Jens said. Somehow he hadn’t expected such forthrightness from a doctor in Mormon Utah. He supposed doctors saw everything, even here. After that hesitation, he went on, “Can you do anything about it?”
“Not much,” Dr. Sharp answered, altogether too cheerfully for Jens’ taste. “If I had sulfa, I could give you some of that and cure you like nobody’s business. If I had acriflavine, I could squirt it up your pipe in a bulb syringe. You wouldn’t like that for beans, but it would do you some good. But since I don’t, no point fretting over it.”
The mere thought of somebody squirting medicine up his pipe made Larssen want to cover his crotch with both hands. “Well, what do you have that will do me some good?” he demanded.
Dr. Sharp opened a drawer, pulled out several little foil-wrapped packets, and handed them to him. “Rubbers,” he said, as if Jens couldn’t figure that out for himself. “Keep you from passing it along for a while, anyway.” He pulled out a fountain pen and a book full of ruled pages. “Where’d you get it? You know? Have to keep records, even with everything all gone to hell these days.”
“A waitress named Mary, back in Idaho Springs, Colorado.”
“Well, well.” The doctor scribbled a note. “You do get around, don’t you, son? You know this here waitress’ last name?”
“It was, uh, Cooley, I think.”
“You think? You got to know her pretty well some ways, though, didn’t you?” Dr. Sharp whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Okay, never mind that for now. You screw anybody else between there and here?”
“No.” Jens looked down at the rubbers in his hand. Next time he did end up in the sack with a woman, he might use one … or he might not. After what the bitches had done to him, he figured he was entitled to get some of his own back.
“Just been a Boy Scout since you got your dose, have you?” Sharp said. “Bet you wish you were a Boy Scout when you got it, too.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Larssen said dryly. The doctor chuckled. Jens went on, “Truth is, I’ve been moving too much to spend time chasing skirt. I’m on government business.”
“Who isn’t, these days?” Dr. Sharp said. “Government’s just about the last thing left that’s working—and it isn’t working what you’d call well. God only knows how we’re supposed to hold an election for President next year, what with the Lizards holding down half the country and beating the tar out of the other half.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jens admitted. It was an interesting problem from a theoretical point of view: as a theoretical physicist, he could appreciate that. The only even remotely similar election would have been the one of 1864, and by then the North had pretty much won the Civil War; it wasn’t invaded itself. “Maybe FDR has volunteered for the duration.”
“Maybe he has,” Sharp said. “Damned if I know who’d run against him, anyhow, or how he’d campaign if he did.”
“Yeah,” Jens said. “Look, Doc, if you don’t have any medicine that’ll help me, what am I supposed to do about what I’ve got?”
Dr. Sharp sighed. “Live with it as best you can. I don’t know what else to tell you. The drugs we’ve been getting the past few years, they’ve let us take a real bite out of germs for the first time ever. I felt like I was really doing something worthwhile. And now I’m just an herb-and-root man again, same as my grandpa back before the turn of the century. Oh, I’m maybe a better surgeon than Gramps was, and I know about asepsis and he didn’t, but that’s about it. I’m sorry, son, but I don’t have anything special to give you.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Larssen said. “Do you think I’m likely to find any other doctors who have the drugs you were talking about?” Even if the acriflavine treatment sounded worse than the disease it was supposed to help, at least it woul
d be over pretty soon. You got gonorrhea for keeps.
“Nobody else here in Ogden, that’s for damn sure,” Dr. Sharp answered. “We share what we have, not that it’s much. Your best bet would be some fellow in a little town who hasn’t used up all his supplies and doesn’t mind sharing them with strangers passing through. A lot of that kind, though, won’t treat anybody but the people they live with. It’s like we’re going back to tribes instead of being one country any more.”
Jens nodded. “I’ve seen that, too. I don’t much like it, but I don’t know what to do about it, either.” Before the Lizards came, he’d taken for granted the notion of a country stretching from sea to shining sea. Now he saw it was an artificial construct, built on the unspoken agreement of citizens and on long freedom from internal strife. He wondered how many other things he’d taken for granted weren’t as self-evident as they seemed to be.
Like Barbara always loving you, for instance, he thought.
Dr. Sharp stuck out a hand. “Sorry I couldn’t help you more, son. No charge, not when I didn’t do anything. Good luck to you.”
“Thanks a bunch, Doc.” Larssen picked up the rifle he’d propped in a corner of the office, slung it over his shoulder, and left without shaking hands. Sharp stared after him, but you didn’t want to get huffy with somebody packing a gun.
Jens had chained his bicycle to a telephone pole outside the doctor’s office. It was still there when he went out to get it. Looking up and down Washington Boulevard (which US 89 turned into when it ran through Ogden), he saw quite a few bikes parked with no chains at all. The Mormons were still a trusting people. His mouth twisted. He’d been trusting, too, and look where it had got him.
“In Ogden goddamn Utah, on my way to a job nobody else wants,” he muttered. A fellow in overalls driving a horse-drawn wagon down the street gave him a reproachful stare. He glared back so fiercely that Mr. Overalls went back to minding his own business, which was a pretty good idea any way you looked at it.
In the Balance & Tilting the Balance Page 137
