Tilting The Balance (38 page)

So, gardens. Beets, potatoes, peas, beans, turnips, parsnips, cabbages, maize… whatever the climate would permit, people grew – and sometimes guarded with cricket bats, savage dogs, or shotguns against two-legged thieves too big to be frightened by scarecrows.

Everyone did come to attention when the Prime Minister, accompanied by a bodyguard who looked as if he never smiled, walked into the Nissen hut. “As you were, gentlemen, please,” Churchill said. “After all, officially I am not here, but speaking over the
BBC
in London. Because I am in the habit of speaking live, I can occasionally use the subterfuge of sound recordings to let myself be in two places at once.” He let out a conspiratorial chuckle. “I hope you won’t give me away.”

Automatically, Goldfarb shook his head. Hearing Churchill’s voice without the static and distortion of a wireless set was to him even more intimate than seeing the Prime Minister in the tubby flesh rather than through photographs: pictures captured his image more accurately than the airwaves did his voice.

Churchill strode over to Fred Hippie, who was standing beside a wooden table on which lay pieces of the turbine from the crashed Lizard fighter’s jet engine. Pointing to them, the Prime Minister asked, “How long before we shall be able to duplicate that engine, Group Captain?”

“Duplicate it, sir?” Hippie said, “It won’t be soon; the Lizards are far ahead of us in control mechanisms for the engine, in machining techniques, and in the materials they employ: they do things with titanium and ceramics we’ve never dreamt of, much less attempted. But in determining how and why they make things as they do, we learn how to do better ourselves.”

“I see,” Churchill’ said thoughtfully. “So even though you have the book in front of you” – he pointed to the Disassembled chunks of turbine again-”you cannot simply read off what is on its pages, but must decode it as if it were written in a cipher.”

“That’s a good analogy, sir,” Hippie said. “The facts of the engine are relatively straightforward,

even if we can’t yet produce one identical to it ourselves. When it comes to the radar from the same downed aircraft, I fear we are still missing a great many code groups, so to speak.”

“So I have been given to understand,” Churchill said, “although I do not fully grasp where the difficulty lies.”

“Let me take you over to Radarman Goldfarb, then, sir,” Hippie said. “He joined the team to help emplace a radar set in production Meteors, and has labored valiantly to unlock the secrets of the Lizard unit that fell into our hands.”

As the group captain brought the Prime Minister over to his workbench, Goldfarb thought, not for the first time, that Fred Hippie was a good man to work for. A lot of superior officers would have done all the explaining to the brass themselves, and pretended their subordinates didn’t exist. But Hippie introduced Goldfarb to Churchill, then stood back and let him speak for himself.

He didn’t find it easy at first. When he stammered, the Prime Minister shifted the subject away from radar: “Goldfarb,” he said musingly. “Was I not told you are the lad with a family connection to Mr. Russie, the former Lizard spokesman from Poland?”

“Yes, that’s true, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “We’re cousins. When my father came to England before the Great War, he urged his sister and her husband to come with him, and he kept urging them to get out until the second war started in ‘39. They wouldn’t listen to him, though. Moishe Russie is their son.”

“So your family kept up the connection, then?”

“Till the war cut us off, yes, sir. After that, I didn’t know what had happened to any of my relatives until Moishe began speaking on the wireless.” He didn’t tell Churchill most of his kinsfolk had died in the ghetto; the Prime Minister presumably knew that already. Besides, Goldfarb couldn’t think about their fate without filling up with a terrible anger that made him wish England were still at war with the Nazis rather than the Lizards.

Churchill said, “I shan’t forget this link. It may yet prove useful for us.” Before Goldfarb could work up the nerve to ask him how, he swung back to radar: “Suppose you explain to me how and why this set is so different from ours, and so baffling.”

“I’ll try, sir,” Goldfarb said. “One of our radars, like a wireless set, depends on valves – vacuum tubes, the Americans would say – for its operation. The Lizards don’t use valves. Instead, they have these things.” He’ pointed to the boards with little lumps and silvery spiderwebs of metal set across them.

“And so?” Churchill said. “Why should a mere substitution pose a problem?”

“Because we don’t know how the bloody things work,” Goldfarb blurted. Wishing the ground would open up and swallow him, he tried to make amends: “That is, we have no theory to explain how these little lumps of silicon – which is what they are, sir – can perform the function of valves. And, because they’re nothing like what we’re used to, we’re having to find out what each one does by cut and try, so to speak: we run power into it and see what happens. We don’t know how much power to use, either.”

Churchill fortunately took his strong language in stride. “And what have you learnt from your experiments?”

“That the Lizards know more about radar than we do, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “That’s the long and short of it, I’m afraid. We can’t begin to make parts to match these: a chemical engineer with whom I’ve spoken says our best silicon isn’t pure enough. And some of the little lumps, when you look at them under a microscope, are so finely etched that we can’t imagine how, let alone why, it’s been done.”

“How and why are for those with the luxury of time, which we have not got,” Churchill said. “We need to know what the device does, whether we can match it, and how to make it less useful to the foe.”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said admiringly. Churchill was no boffin, but he had a firm grip on priorities. No one yet fully understood the theory of the magnetron, or how and why the narrow channels connecting its eight outer holes to the larger central one exponentially boosted the strength of the signal. That the device operated so, however, was undeniable fact, and had given the
RAF
a great lead over German radar – although not, worse luck, over what the Lizards used.

Group Captain Hippie said, “What have we learnt which is exploitable, Goldfarb?”

“Sorry, sir; I should have realized at once that was what the Prime Minister needed to know. We can copy the design of the Lizards’ magnetron; that, at least, we recognize. It gives a signal of shorter wavelength and hence more precise direction than any we’ve made ourselves. And the nose dish that receives returning pulses is a very fine bit of engineering which shouldn’t be impossible to incorporate into later marks of the Meteor.”

“Very good, Radarman Goldfarb,” Churchill said. “I shan’t keep you from your work any longer. With the aid of men like you and your comrades in this hut, we shall triumph over this adversity as we have over all others. And you, Radarman, you may yet have a role to play even more important than your work here.”

The Prime Minister looked uncommonly cherubic. Three years in the
RAF
had taught Goldfarb that rankers who wore that expression had more up their sleeves than their arms. They’d also taught him he couldn’t do anything about it, so he said what he had to say: “I’ll be happy to serve in any way I can, sir.”

Churchill nodded genially, then went back to Hippie and his colleagues for more talk about jet engines. After another few minutes, he put his hat back on, tipped it to Hippie, and left the Nissen hut.

Basil Roundbush grinned at Goldfarb. “I say, old man, after Winnie makes you an MP, do remember the little people who knew you before you grew rich and famous.”

“An MP?” Goldfarb shook his head in mock dismay. “Lord, I hope that’s not what he had in mind. He said he had something important instead of this.”

That sally met with general approval. One of the meteorologists said, “Good job you didn’t tell him you’re a Labour supporter, Goldfarb.”

“It doesn’t matter, not now.” Goldfarb had backed Labour, yes, as offering more to the working man than the Tories could (and, as was true of a lot of Jewish immigrants and their progeny, his own politics had a slant to the left). But he also knew no one but Churchill could have rallied Britain against Hitler, and no one else could have kept her in the fight against the Lizards.

Thinking of the Nazis and the Lizards together made Goldfarb think of the invasion so many had feared in 1940. The Germans hadn’t been able to bring it off, not least because radar kept them from driving the
RAF
from the skies. If the Lizards came, no one could offer any such guarantee of success. Ironically, the Germans holding northern France served as England’s shield against invasion by the aliens.

But the shield was not perfect. The Lizards had control of the air when they chose to use it. They could leapfrog over northern France and the Channel both. Just because, they hadn’t done it didn’t mean they wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Goldfarb snorted. The only thing he could do about that was try to make British radar more effective, which would in turn make the Lizards pay more if they decided to invade. It wasn’t as much as he’d have wanted to do in an ideal world, but it was more than most people could say, so be supposed it would do.

And he’d not only met Winston Churchill, but talked business with him! That wasn’t something everyone could say. He couldn’t write home to his family that the Prime Minister had been here – the censors would never pass it – but he could tell them if he ever got down to London. He’d almost given up on the notion of leave.

Fred Hippie said, “Churchill’s full of good ideas. The only difficulty is, he’s also full of bad ones, and sometimes telling the one from the other’s not easy till after the fact.”

“What he said about tackling the Lizards’ radar circuitry was first-rate,” Goldfarb said. “What is more important for us now than how or why, we can use what we learn without knowing why it works, just as some stupid clot can drive a motorcar without cluttering his head with the theory of internal combustion.”

“Ah, but someone must understand the theory, or your stupid clot would have no motorcar to drive,” Basil Roundbush said.

“That’s true only to a limited degree,” Hippie said. “Even now, theory takes you only so far in aircraft design; eventually, you just have to go out and see how the beast flies. That was much more the case during the Great War, when practically everything, from what the older engineers have told me, was cut and try. Yet the aircraft they manufactured did fly.”

“Most of the time,” Roundbush said darkly. “I’m bloody glad I never had to go up in them.”

Goldfarb ignored that. Roundbush made wisecracks the same way other men fiddled with rosaries or cracked their knuckles or tugged at one particular lock of hair: it was a nervous tic, nothing more.

Clucking softly to himself, Goldfarb fixed a power source to one side of a Lizard circuit element and an ohmmeter to the other. He’d measure voltage and amperage next: with these strange components, you couldn’t tell what they were supposed to do to a current that ran through them except by experiment.

He turned on the power. The ohmmeter swung; the component did resist the current’s flow. Goldfarb grunted in satisfaction: He’d thought it would: it looked like others that had. He noted down the reading, as well as where the circuit element sat on its board and what it looked like. Then he turned off the power and hooked up the voltage meter. One tiny piece at a time, he added to the jigsaw puzzle.

As Vyacheslav Molotov turned the knob that led him into the antechamber in front of Stalin’s night office, he felt and suppressed a familiar nervousness. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, his word went unchallenged. In negotiating with the capitalist states that hated the Soviet revolution, even in discussions with the Lizards, he was the unyielding representative of his nation. He knew he had a reputation for being inflexible, and did everything he could to play it up.

Not here, though. Anyone who was unyielding and inflexible with Stalin would soon know the stiffness of death. Then Molotov had no more time for such reflections, for Stalin’s orderly – oh, the fellow had a fancy title, but that was what he was – nodded to him and said, “Go on in. He expects you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich.”

Molotov nodded and entered Stalin’s sanctum. This was not where the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was photographed with diplomats or soldiers. He had a fancy office upstairs for that. He worked here, at hours that suited him. It was one-thirty in the morning. Stalin would be at it for at least another couple of hours. Those who dealt with him had to adjust themselves accordingly.

Stalin looked up from the desk with the gooseneck lamp. “Good morning, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said with his throaty Georgian accent. His voice held no irony; morning it was, as far as he was concerned.

“Good morning, losef Vissarionovich,” Molotov replied. Whatever his feelings about the matter were, he had schooled himself not to reveal them. He found that important at any time, doubly so around the ruler of the Soviet Union.

Stalin waved Molotov to a chair, then stood up himself. Though well-proportioned, he was short, and did not like other men looming over him. What he did not like did not occur. He filled his pipe from a leather tobacco pouch, lit a match, and got the pipe going.

The harsh smell of makhorka. cheap Russian tobacco, made Molotov’s nose twitch in spite of himself. Under the iron-gray mustache, Stalin’s lip curled. “I know it’s vile, but it’s all I can find these days. What shipping we get has no room aboard for luxuries.”

That said as much as anything about the plight in which mankind found itself. When the leader of one of the three greatest nations on the planet could not get decent tobacco even for himself, the Lizards were the ones with the upper hand. Well, if he understood what was in Stalin’s mind, this meeting was to be about how to tilt the balance back the other way.

Stalin sucked in more smoke, paced back and forth. At length he said, “So the Americans and Germans are pressing ahead with their programs to make bombs of this explosive metal?”