In the Balance (51 page)

Rivka draped a threadbare blanket over him. “How can you look sick if
you’re not covered up?” she asked.

“I seem to have managed,” he said, but she ignored him. He let the blanket stay.

About the time he came close to dozing off, Reuven started banging on a pot with a spoon. Rivka quickly hushed the boy, but the damage was done. A few minutes later, a new, more ominous racket filled the flat: the distant rattle of guns. “Where is it coming from?” Russie asked, turning his head this way and that. If it was from the north, the Jews and Poles might really have opened up on each other; if from the south, Anielewicz’s fighters in German uniform were hitting the radio transmitter.

“I can’t tell, either,” Rivka said. “The sound is funny inside a block of flats.”

“That’s true.” Russie settled himself to wait. The shooting and explosions lasted only a couple of minutes. He’d nearly forgotten the echoing silence that followed gunfire, though he’d heard it almost daily before the Lizards seized Warsaw from the Germans.

Half an hour later, another knock came at the apartment door. Rivka opened it. Without ceremony, a Lizard walked in. He fixed both eyes on Russie. In hissing German, he said, “I am Ssfeer, from the governor Zolraag’s staff. You know me now?”

“Yes, I recognized your body paint,” Moishe answered. “How can I help you? I fear I cannot do much at the moment; I was taken ill this morning.”

“So the prominent Zolraag learned,” Ssfeer said. “He—how say you?—he gives permissions to you to get well more slow. Bandits from Deutschland just now they—how say you?—shoot up radio, maybe to keep you quiet, not let you speak. We need maybe ten days to fix.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Russie said.

The Lancaster rumbled down the runway, engines roaring. The plane bounced and shuddered as it gained speed; Lizard bomblets had cratered the runway the week before, and repairs were crude. George Bagnall knew nothing but relief that they weren’t trying to take off with a full bomb load. Bombs were delicate things; once in a while, a bump would set one off … after which, the groundcrew would have another crater, a big one, to fill in.

The bomber fairly sprang into the air. In the pilot’s seat next to Bagnall’s, Ken Embry grinned. “Amazing what lightening the aircraft will do,” Embry said. “I feel like I’m flying a Spitfire.”

“I think it’s all in your head,” Bagnall replied. “The radar unit back there, can’t be a great deal lighter than the ordnance we usually carry.” The flight engineer flicked an intercom switch. “How is it doing, Radarman Goldfarb?”

“Seems all right,” he heard in his earphones. “I can see a long way.”

“That’s the idea,” Bagnall said. A radar set in an aircraft several miles
above the Earth could peer farther around its curve pick up Lizard planes as they approached, and give England’s defenses a few precious extra minutes to prepare. Bagnall shivered inside his flight suit and furs as the Lanc gained altitude. He switched on his oxygen, tasted the rubber of the hose as he breathed the enriched air.

Goldfarb spoke enthusiastically. “If we can keep just a few planes in the air, they’ll do as much for us as all our ground stations put together. Of course,” he added, “we also have a good deal farther to fall.”

Bagnall tried not to think about that. The Lizards had pounded British ground radar in the opening days of their invasion, forcing the RAF and ground defenses to fight blind ever since. Now they were trying to see again. The Lizards were not likely to want to let them see.

“Coming up on angels twenty,” Ken Embry announced. “Taking station at the altitude. Radioman, how is our communication with the
fighter
pack?”

“Reading them five by five,” Ted Lane replied. “They report receiving us five by five as well. They are eager to begin the exercise, sir.”

“Bloody maniacs,” Embry said. “As far as I’m concerned, the ideal mission is one devoid of all contact with the enemy whatsoever.”

Bagnall could not have agreed more. Despite machine gun turrets all over the aircraft, the Lancaster had always been at a dreadful disadvantage against enemy fighters; evasion beat the blazes out of combat. The knowledge made bomber aircrew cautious, and made them view swaggering, aggressive fighter pilots as not quite right in the head.

From back in the bomb bay, David Goldfarb said, “I ought to be able to communicate directly with the fighter aircraft rather than relaying through the radioman.”

“That’s a good notion, Goldfarb,” Bagnall said. “Jot it down; maybe they’ll be able to use it on the Mark 2.”
And maybe, if we keep on being luckier than we deserve, we’ll live to try out the Mark 2
, he added to himself. He didn’t need to say it aloud; Goldfarb had known what the odds were when he volunteered for this mission.

Bagnall wiped the inside of the curved Perspex window in front of him with a piece of chamois cloth. Nothing much to see out there, not even the exhaust flames from other bombers ahead, above, below, and to either side—reassuring reminders one was not going into danger all alone. Now there was only night, night and the endless throb of the four Merlins. Consciously reminded of the engines, the flight engineer flicked his eyes over the gauges in front of him. Mechanically, all was well.

“I have enemy aircraft,” Goldfarb exclaimed. Back in the bomb bay, he couldn’t see even the night, just the tracks of electrons across a phosphor-coated screen. But his machine vision reached farther than Bagnall’s eyes. “I say again, I have enemy aircraft. Heading 177, distance thirty-five miles
and closing, speed 505.”

Ted Lane passed that word on to the Mosquitoes that lurked far above the radar-carrying Lancaster. The twin-engine planes not only had the highest operational ceiling of any British fighters, they were also, with their wooden skins and skeletons, harder for radar to acquire.

“Rockets away from the Lizard aircraft,” Goldfarb yelped. “Bearing—straight for us. Speed—too bloody fast for my machine here.”

“Shut it down,” Embry ordered. He threw the Lanc into a violent, corkscrewing dive that made Bagnall glad for the straps that held him in his seat. His stomach felt a couple of thousand feet behind the aircraft. He gulped, wishing he hadn’t had greasy fish and chips less than an hour before the mission started.

An excited yell from Joe Simpkin in the tail gunner’s turret echoed in his headset. The gunner added, “One of those rockets flew through where we used to be.”

“Well, by God,” Ken Embry said softly. The pilot, who made a point of never letting anything impress him, added, “Who would have thought the boffins could actually get one right?”

“I’m rather glad they did,” Bagnall said, stressing his broad “a”s to show he also took such miracles for granted. The engineers down on the ground had been confident the Lizards would attack a radar-carrying aircraft with the same radar-homing rockets they’d used to wreck the British ground stations. Turn off the radar. and what would they have to home on? Nothing. Down on the ground, it all seemed as inexorably logical as a geometric proof. The boffins, however, didn’t have to test their theories in person. That was what aircrews were for.

“Shall I start it up again?” Goldfarb asked over the intercom. “No, better not, not quite yet,” Embry said after a moment’s thought.

“It does us no good if it isn’t running,” the radarman said plaintively.

It does us no bloody good if it gets us shot down, either
, Bagnall thought. But that wasn’t fair, and he knew it. For someone whose only time in the air had been practicing for this mission, Goldfarb was doing fine. And not only was it natural for him to want to play with his toy, he had a point. A radar set that had to shut down as soon as action started to keep from being destroyed was better than no radar set at all, but not much. Along with letting Goldfarb talk directly with the fighters his radar directed, the boffins would have to come up with a way to let him keep the set operating without getting it and its aircraft blown out of the sky.

Ted Lane let out an ear-piercing Red Indian whoop. “A Mosquito just took out one of their planes. Bounced him from above, almost head-on—couldn’t very well come up on him from behind, could he, what with the Lizards’ being the faster aircraft. Says he saw the enemy break up in
midair, and then he was diving for the deck for all he was worth.”

Everyone in the Lancaster cheered. Then Ken Embry said, “What about the rest of the Mosquitoes?”

After a moment, the radioman answered, “Er—several of them do not respond to my signal, sir.” That dashed the moment of exultation. The RAF was slowly, painfully learning how to hurt the Lizards. The Lizards already knew only too well how to hurt the RAF. Bagnall hoped the fighter pilots had managed to bail out. Trained men were harder to replace than airplanes.

From his station in front of the now-dark radar screen, Goldfarb said, “The chaps on the ground have been listening to us, too. With a bit of luck, they’ll also have hurt the Lizards: at least, they’ll have had the advantage of knowing a bit sooner from which direction they’re coming.”

“Fat bloody lot of good it’ll do them,” Embry said. Like any pilot, he pretended to disbelieve flak crews could possibly hit anything with their guns. If that attitude made flying seem safer for him, Bagnall was not about to complain. A calm pilot was a smooth pilot, and a smooth pilot was likeliest to bring his aircrew home again.

Goldfarb repeated, “May I turn the set on again, sir?”

Embry took his right hand off the stick, pounded a closed fist up and down on his thigh. Bagnall didn’t think he knew he was doing it. At last the pilot said, “Yes, go ahead; you may as well. As you’ve noted, that is the purpose of our being up here on this lovely fall evening.”

“Really?” Bagnall said. “And all the time I thought it was to see how fast the Lizards could shoot us down. The groundcrew have formed a pool on it, I understand. Did you toss in your shilling, Ken?”

“I’m afraid not,” Embry answered, imperturbable. “When they told me someone had already chosen twenty seconds after takeoff, I decided my chances for winning were about nil, so I held onto my money out of consideration for my heirs. What about you, old fellow?”

“Sorry to have spoiled your wager, but I’m afraid I’m the chap who took the twenty seconds after we left the ground.” Bagnall was not about to let the pilot outdo him in offhandedness, not this time. “I admit I did wonder how I’d go about collecting if I happened to win.”

The radar set, like any human-built piece of electronic apparatus, needed a little while to warm up after it went on. Bagnall had heard rumors that Lizard gear taken from shot-down planes went on instantly. He wondered if they were true; from what he knew, valves (tubes, the Americans called them) by their very nature required warm-up time. Maybe the Lizards didn’t use valves, though he had no idea what might take their place.

“Another flight incoming, same bearing as before,” Goldfarb announced. “Range … twenty-three miles and closing too bloody fast.
Shall I shut it down now?”

“No, wait until they launch their rockets at us,” Embry said. Bagnall wondered if the pilot had lost his mind, and even wondered if there really was a groundcrew pool and if Embry was trying to win it. But Embry proved to have method in his madness: We’ve already seen we can evade the rockets that track us by our own radar. If we shut down before they fire those, they may get closer and shoot rockets of a different sort at us, ones we can’t evade.”

“Their tactics do tend to be stereotyped, don’t they?” Bagnall agreed after a little thought. “Given a choice, they’ll do the same thing over and over, regardless of whether it’s the right thing. And if it’s wrong, why give them the excuse to change?”

“Just what was in my—” Embry began.

Goldfarb interrupted him: “Rockets away! Shutting down—
now.”

Again the Lancaster spun through the air; again Bagnall wondered if the fish and chips would stay down. And again, the Lizards’ rockets failed to bring down the British aircraft. “Maybe this isn’t a suicide mission after all,” Bagnall said happily. He’d had his doubts as the Lanc rolled down the runway.

Ted Lane listened to the surviving Mosquitoes as they made their runs at the attackers. “Another hit!” he said. This time, though, no one in the Lancaster shouted for joy. The aircrew had realized the price the fighter pilots were paying for every kill.

Then the radioman told Embry, “We are ordered to break off operations and return to base. The air vice marshal remarks that, having been lucky twice, he’s not inclined to tempt fate by pushing for a third bit of good fortune.”

“The air vice marshal is a little old woman,” the pilot retorted. He added hastily, “You need not inform him of my opinion, however. We shall of course obey his instructions like the good little children we are. Navigator, if you would be so kind as to suggest a course—”

“Suggest is the proper word, all right,” Alf Whyte said from his little curtained-off space behind the pilot’s and flight engineer’s seats. “What with some of the twists you put the aircraft through, I thought the compass was jitterbugging to a hot swing band. If we are where I think we are, a course of 078 will bring us to the general neighborhood of Dover in ten or twelve minutes.”

“Oh-seven-eight it is,” Embry said. “Turning to that course now.” He swung the bomber through the sky as if it were an extension of himself.

George Bagnall watched the neatly ordered phalanx of gauges in front of him as intently as if they monitored his own heartbeat and breathing. In a very real way, they did: if the Lancaster’s engines or hydraulic system failed, his heart would not go on beating for very long.

“I have contact with the airfield,” the radioman announced. “They read us five by five and report no damage from the Lizards this evening.”

“That’s good to hear,” Embry said. Bagnall nodded. The landing would be rough enough as it was, what with the hasty repairs to earlier repairs from the sky. The Lanc wouldn’t be coming in with combat damage or unexpended bombs, as it might have from a mission over Germany or France, but its fuel tanks were much fuller than they would have been on the return flight from such a mission. The petrol the plane burned made a more-than-satisfactory explosive when things went wrong.