Tilting the Balance w-2

by Harry Turtledove

  They labored on until well past eight, trying to make up for time lost to the Lizard raid. They didn’t catch up; Goldfarb spent most of his time looking for the papers he needed, and didn’t always find them. The other four men, being more concerned with engines than radar, had grabbed those file folders first and his as an afterthought.

  When Fred Hipple yawned and stood up from his stool, that was a signal for everyone else to knock off, too: if he’d had enough, they didn’t need to be ashamed to show they were worn. Goldfarb felt it in the shoulders and in the small of the back.

  Hipple, a man of uncommon rectitude, headed for the refectory and then, presumably, for his cot-such, at least, was his usual habit. Goldfarb, though, had had a bellyful-in both the literal and figurative senses of the word-of the food the RAF kitchens turned out. After a while, stewed meat (when there was meat), soya links, stewed potatoes and cabbage, dumplings the size, shape, and consistency of billiard balls, and stewed prunes got to be too much.

  He climbed onto his bicycle and headed for nearby Bruntingthorpe. Nor was he surprised to hear the rattling squeak of another bicycle’s imperfectly oiled chain right behind him. Looking back over his shoulder in the darkness would have been an invitation to go straight over the handlebars. Instead, he called, “A Friend In Need-”

  Basil Roundbush’s chuckle came ahead to him. The flight officer finished the catch phrase: “-is a friend indeed.”

  A few minutes later, they both pulled up in front of A Friend In Need, the only pub Bruntingthorpe boasted. Without the RAF aerodrome just outside the hamlet, the place would not have had enough customers to stay open. As things were, it flourished. So did the fish-and-chips shop next door, though Goldfarb fought shy of that one because of the big tins of lard that showed up in its refuse bins. He was not nearly so rigid in his Orthodox faith as his parents, but eating chips fried in pig’s fat was more than he could stomach.

  “Two pints of bitter,” Roundbush called. The publican poured them from his pitcher, passed them across the bar in exchange for silver. Roundbush raised his pint pot in salute to Goldfarb. “Confusion to the Lizards!”

  They both drained their pints. The beer was not what it had been before the war. After the first or second pint, though, you stopped noticing. Following immemorial custom, Goldfarb bought the second round. “No confusion to us tomorrow, when they fetch the damaged goods,” he declared. He said no more, not off the base.

  “I’ll drink to that, by God!” Roundbush said, and proved it “The more we can learn about how they do what they do, the better our chance of keeping them from doing it”

  The innkeeper leaned across the waxed oak surface of the bar. “I’ve still got half a roasted capon in the back room, lads,” he said in a confidential voice. “Four and six, if you’re interested-”

  The slap of coins on the bar gave his sentence its end punctuation. “Light meat or dark?” Goldfarb asked when the bird appeared: as an officer, Roundbush had the right to choose.

  “I fancy breasts more than legs,” Roundbush answered, and added, after the perfect tiny pause, “and I like light meat better, too.”

  So did Goldfarb, but he ate the dark without complaint; it was vastly better than anything they made back at the aerodrome. The two RAF men each bought another round. Then, regretfully, they rode back to the base. Keeping bicycles on a steady course seemed complicated after four pints of even bad bitter.

  The headache Goldfarb had the next morning told him he probably shouldn’t have drunk the last one. Basil Roundbush looked disgustingly fresh. Goldfarb did his best to keep Group Captain Hipple from noticing he was hung over. He thought he succeeded, and got help because no one was working at his best, not only because of yesterday’s raid, but also because everyone was looking forward to examining the wreckage from the Lizard plane.

  Said wreckage did not arrive until nearly eleven, which put everyone, even the patient, mild-mannered Hipple, on edge. When it finally happened, though, the arrival was a portent: the fragments came to Bruntingthorpe aboard a pair of 6x6 GMC trucks.

  The big rumbling American machines seemed to Goldfarb almost as great a prodigy as the cargo they bore. Next to them, the British lorries he was used to were awkward makeshifts, timid and underpowered. If the Lizards hadn’t come, thousands of these broad-shouldered bruisers would have been hauling men and equipment all around England. As it was, only the earliest handful of arrivals were working here. The Yanks had more urgent use for the rest on their own side of the Atlantic.

  That a couple of the precious American lorries had been entrusted with their present cargo spoke volumes about how important the RAF reckoned it. The lorries also boasted winches, which helped get the pieces out of the cargo compartments: radar and engine, especially the latter, were too heavy for convenient manhandling.

  “We have to get these under cover as quickly as we can,” Hipple said. “We don’t want Lizard reconnaissance aircraft noting that we’re trying to learn their secrets.”

  Even as he spoke, men from the groundcrew were draping camouflage netting over the wreckage. Before long, it looked pretty much like meadow from above. Goldfarb said, “They’ll expect us to rebuild the Nissen hut they wrecked yesterday. When we do, it might be worthwhile to move this gear into it. That way, the Lizards won’t be able to tell we have it.”

  “Very good suggestion, David,” Hipple said, beaming. “I expect we’ll do that as soon as we have the opportunity. Yet no matter how quickly they can run up a Nissen hut, we shan’t wait for them. I want to attack these beasts as rapidly as possible, as I’m certain you do also.”

  There Hipple was right. Even though it was gloomy under the netting, Goldfarb got to work right away. The Lizard plane must have come down on its belly rather than nose first, a happy accident that had indeed kept it from being too badly smashed up. Part of the streamlined nose assembly remained in place in front of the parabolic radar antenna.

  The antenna itself had escaped crumpling. It was smaller than Goldfarb had expected; for that matter, the whole unit was smaller than he’d expected. The Lizards had mounted it in front of their pilot-that was obvious. It was good design; Goldfarb wished the set that would go into the Meteor was small enough to imitate it.

  Some of the sheet metal around the radar had torn. Peering through a gap, Goldfarb saw bundles of wires with bright-colored insulation. Coded somehow, he thought, wishing he knew which color meant what.

  Even wrecked, the finish of the Lizard aircraft was very fine. Welds were smooth and flat, rivets countersunk so their heads lay flush with the metal skin. Even tugging with pliers at a tear in the metal to widen it so he could reach inside felt like tampering to Goldfarb.

  Behind the radar antenna lay the magnetron; he recognized the curved shape of its housing. It was the last piece of apparatus he did recognize. Things that looked like screws held it to the rest of the unit. They did not, however, have conventional heads. Instead of openings for a flat-blade or Phillips-head screwdriver, they had square cavities sunk into the centers of the heads.

  Goldfarb rummaged through the tools on his belt till he found a flat-blade screwdriver whose blade fit across the diagonal of one of the Lizard screws. He turned it. Nothing happened. He gave the screw a hard look that quickly turned speculative and tried to turn it the other way. It began to come out.

  Bad language was coming from the RAF men working on the engine. Suspecting he knew why, Goldfarb called, “The screws are backwards to ours: anticlockwise tightens, clockwise loosens.”

  He heard a couple of seconds’ silence, then a grunt of satisfaction. Fred Hipple said, “Thank you, David. Lord only knows how long that would have taken to occur to us. One can sometimes become too wedded to the obvious.”

  Goldfarb fairly burst with pride. This from the man who had designed and patented the jet engine almost ten years before the war began! Praise indeed, he thought.

  The bad language from the engine crew faded away as the officers got the casing
off and started looking at the guts. “They use fir-tree roots to secure the turbine blades, sir,” Julian Peary said indignantly. “Pity you had so much trouble convincing the powers that be it was a good notion.”

  “The Lizards have had this technology in place rather longer than we have, Wing Commander,” Hipple answered. Despite long thwarting by RAF indifference and even hostility, he showed no bitterness.

  “And look,” Basil Roundbush said. “The blades have a slight twist to them. How long ago did you suggest that, sir? Two years? Three?”

  Whatever Hipple’s answer was, Goldfarb didn’t hear it. He’d loosened enough screws himself to get off a panel of the radar’s case. He had a good notion of what he’d find inside: since physical laws had to be the same all through the universe, he figured the Lizard set would closely resemble the ones he was used to. Oh, it would be smaller and lighter and better engineered than RAF models, but still essentially similar. Valves, after all, remained valves-unless you went to the United States, where they turned into tubes.

  But the second he got a good look at the radar, the flush of pride he’d felt a little while before evaporated. Hipple and his team could make some sense of what they saw inside the jet engine. The parts of the radar set remained a complete mystery to Goldfarb. The only thing of which he could be certain was that it had no valves… or even tubes.

  What took their place was sheets of grayish-brown material with silvery lines etched onto them. Some had little lumpy things of various shapes and colors affixed. Form said nothing about function, at least not to Goldfarb.

  Basil Roundbush chose that moment to inquire, “How goes it with you, David?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t go at all.” Goldfarb knew he sounded like a bad translation from the French. He didn’t care: he’d found the simplest way to tell the truth.

  “Pity,” Roundbush said. “Well, I don’t suppose we need every single answer this morning. One or two of them may possibly wait until tonight.”

  Goldfarb’s answering laugh had a distinctly hollow ring.

  Mutt Daniels drew the cloth patch through the barrel of his tommy gun. “You got to keep your weapon clean,” he told the men in his squad. Telling-even ordering-accomplished only so much. Leading by example worked better.

  Kevin Donlan obediently started in on his rifle. He obeyed Daniels like a father (or maybe, Mutt thought uneasily, like a grandfather-he was old enough to be the kid’s grandfather, if he and his hypothetical child had started early). Other than that, though, he had a soldier’s ingrained suspicion of anyone of higher rank than his own-which in his case meant just about the whole Army. He asked, “Sarge, what are we doing in Mount Pulaski anyways?”

  Daniels paused in his cleaning to consider that. He wished he had a chaw; working the wad of tobacco in his mouth always helped him think. He hadn’t come across one in a long time, though. He said, “Near as I can see, somebody looked at a map, saw ‘Mount,’ and figured this here was high ground. Hell of a mountain, ain’t it?”

  The men laughed. Mount Pulaski was on higher ground than the surrounding hamlets-by twenty, thirty, sometimes even fifty or sixty feet. It hardly seemed worth having spent lives to take the place, even if it did also sit at the junction of State Roads 121 and 54.

  Bela Szabo said, “They finally figured out we weren’t about to take Decatur, so they figured they’d move us someplace new and see how many casualties we can take here.” Szabo wasn’t much older than Kevin Donlan, but had a couple of extra lifetimes’ worth of cynicism under his belt.

  But Mutt shook his head. “Nash, that ain’t it, Dracula. What they’re really after is seein’ how many fancy old-time buildings they can blow to hell. They’re gettin’ right good at it, too.”

  The Mount Pulaski Courthouse was his case in point, here. Almost a hundred years old, it was a two-story Greek Revival building of red-brown brick with a plain classical pediment. Or rather, it had been: after a couple of artillery hits, more of it was rubble than building. But enough still stood to show it would have been worth saving.

  “You boys hungry?” a woman called. “I’ve got some ducks and some fried trout here if you are.” She held up a big wicker picnic basket.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mutt said enthusiastically. “Beats the sh-pants off what the Army feeds us-when they feed us.” Quartermaster arrangements had gone to hell, what with the Lizards hitting supply lines whenever they could. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of locals, Daniels and his men would have gone hungry a lot more than they did.

  The woman came up to the front porch of the wrecked house where the squad was sitting. None of the young soldiers paid her any particular mind-she was a year or two past forty, with a tired face and mousebrown hair streaked with gray. Their attention was on the basket she carried.

  Springfields and M-1s still came with bayonets, even If nobody was likely to use them in combat any more. They turned out to make first-rate duck carvers, though. The roast ducks were greasy and gamy. Mutt still ate duck in preference to trout; the only fish he cared for was catfish.

  “Mighty fine, ma’am,” Kevin Donlan said, licking his fingers. “Where’d you come by all this good stuff, anyhow?”

  “Up in Lincoln Lakes, six, seven miles north of here,” she answered. “They aren’t real lakes, just gravel pits filled with water but they re stocked with fish and I can use a shotgun.”

  “Found that out,” Mutt said His teeth had stumbled on birdshot a couple of times. You could break one that way If you weren’t lucky. He tossed aside a leg bone gnawed bare, then went on, “Mighty kind, of you to go to so much trouble for us, uh”-his eyes flicked to her left hand to see if she wore a ring-“Miss…”

  “I’m Lucille Potter,” she answered. “What’s your name?”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Lucille,” he said. “I’m M-uh, Pete Daniels.” He thought of himself as Mutt these days; he had for years. But that didn’t seem the right way to introduce yourself to a woman you’d just met. The kids might ignore her-they were younger than most of the players he’d managed-but she didn’t look half bad to him.

  Only trouble was, the kids wouldn’t let him get away with being Pete. Some of them started rolling in the dirt; even Kevin Donlan snorted. Lucille looked from one of them to the next. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  Resignedly, Daniels said, “My name’s Pete, but they usually call me Mutt.”

  “Is that what you’d rather be called?” she asked. When he nodded, she went on, “Why didn’t you say so, then? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Her brisk tones made a couple of the soldiers look abashed, but more of them didn’t care what she said, even If she had brought them food. The matter-of-fact common sense in her words made him eye her speculatively. “You a schoolteacher, ma’am?”

  She smiled. That made some of her tiredness fall away and let him see what she’d looked like when she was twenty-five or so. No, she wasn’t bad at all. She said, “Pretty good guess, but you didn’t notice my shoes.”

  They were white-an awfully dirty white now-with thick, rubbery soles. “You’re a nurse,” Mutt said.

  Lucille Potter nodded. “I sure am. I’ve been doing a doctor’s work since the Lizards came, though. Mount Pulaski only had Doc Hanrahan, and somebody’s bomb-God knows whose-landed in his front yard just when he was coming out the door. He never knew what hit him, anyhow.”

  “Lord, I wish we could take you with us, ma’am,” Kevin Donlan said. “The medics we got, they ain’t everything they oughta be. ‘Course, what is these days?”

  “That purely is a fact,” Daniels agreed. The Army tried hard, the same as it did with supplies. As with supplies, war’s disruption was too great to permit hurt men proper care. He suspected his grandfathers in the War Between the States hadn’t risked much worse medical treatment. Doctors knew a lot more nowadays, but so what? All the knowledge in the world didn’t matter if you couldn’t get your hands on the medicines and instruments you needed to use i
t.

  Lucille Potter said, “Why the hell not?”

  Mutt gaped at her, startled twice-first at the casual way she swore and then by how she fell in with Donlan’s suggestion, which had been more wistful than serious. Mutt said, “But, ma’am, you’re a woman.” He thought that explained everything.

  “So?” Lucille said-evidently she didn’t. “Would you care if I was digging a bullet out of your leg? Or do you think your boys here are going to gang-rape me the second your back is turned?”

  “But-But-” Mutt spluttered like a man who can’t swim floundering out of a creek. He felt his face turn red. His men were staring at Lucille Potter with their mouths open. Rape wasn’t a word you said around a woman, let alone a word you expected to hear from one.

  She went on, “Maybe I should bring my shotgun along. You think that might make ’em behave?”

  “Y all mean it,” he said, surprised again this time into a Southernism he seldom used.

  “Of course I. mean it,” she said. “Get to know me for a while and you’ll find out I hardly ever say things I don’t mean. People in town were stupid, too, till they started coming down sick and breaking bones and having babies. Then they found out what I could do-because they had to. You can’t afford to wait around like that, can you? If you give me five minutes, I’ll go home and get my black bag. Or”-she shrugged-“you can do without.”

  Mutt thought hard. Whatever the trouble she brought with her, could it be worse than the hurts they’d take that would go bad without a doctor? He didn’t think so. But he also wanted to find out why she was volunteering, so he asked, “How come you want to leave this town, If you’re the only thing even halfway close to a doctor here?”

  “When the Lizards held this part of the state, I had to stay here-I was the only one around who could do anything,” Lucille answered. “But now that proper human beings are back in charge, it’ll be easier to bring a real doctor around. And an awful lot of what I’ve been doing lately is patching up hurt soldiers. I hate to put it so plain, Mutt, but I think you people are liable to need me worse than Mount Pulaski does.”