In the Balance

“I suppose he’ll want another pint, too,” Daphne said darkly as she returned with the filled glass. “The one he has is empty now, that’s bloody sure.” Without waiting for an answer, she carried Jones’ dead soldier away to be revivified.

The newly enlarged group exchanged names. The pilot of the aircrew, Ken Embry, said, “You have to remember two things, Goldfarb: Warsaw isn’t likely to be just like Paris by any means, and it isn’t under the Germans any more.”

“I understand all that,” Goldfarb said. “But anything I can find out will be of value to me.”

“Fair enough,” said the flight engineer, whose name was George Bagnall. “Aside from the six-pointed stars, I saw shops and even telephone booths with signs saying things like ‘No Jews allowed’ and ‘Patronage by Jews prohibited.’ Other shops had special late-afternoon hours for Jews, so they could only pick over what other people had left.”

“Bastards,” Goldfarb muttered.

“Who, the Jerries? Too right they are,” Embry said. “We didn’t see anything, though, like the photos the Lizards have released from Warsaw, or like what the people who live there talk about on the Lizards’ wireless programs. If even a tenth part of that’s true, by God, I’m damned if I blame those poor devils for rising up against the Nazis, not a bit of it.”

The rest of the aircrew spoke up in agreement, all save Douglas Bell; the bomb-aimer and Sylvia were so wrapped up in each other that Goldfarb half expected them to consummate their friendship on the table or the floor. If Bell aimed his bombs as well as he did his hands, he’d done some useful work.

Embry said, “Even with pictures, I have trouble believing the Jerries built a slaughterhouse for people at whatever the name of that place was.”

“Treblinka,” Goldfarb said. He had trouble believing it, too, but less trouble, he guessed, than Embry. To a young Englishman whose accent said he came from the comfortable classes, organized murder like that might really be unthinkable. To Goldfarb, whose father had fled less organized but no less sincere persecution, the notion of a place like Treblinka was merely dreadful Where Embry couldn’t imagine it, Goldfarb could, and had to hope he was wrong.

“How has it been back here, day by day?” Bagnall asked. “Until Jerry shipped us home from Calais, we’ve been in the air so much all we did on the ground was sleep and eat.”

Goldfarb and Jones looked at each other. “It’s not been the push-button war we had during the Blitz,” Goldfarb said at last “The Lizards are smarter than Jerry; they took out our radar straightaway and send more rockets after it whenever we try to light it up again. So we’ve been reduced to field glasses and telephones, like in the old days.”

Daphne came back with Jerome Jones’ new pint. He leered at her. “David’s been using his field glasses to peer in your window.”

“Really?” she said coolly, setting the pint down. “And all the time I thought it was you.”

Jones’ fair English skin made his flush visible even by the light of the, fireplace. Goldfarb and the aircrew howled laughter. Even Douglas Bell untangled himself from Sylvia long enough to say, “There’s a fair hit, by God!” Jones buried his nose in the pint.

“Do you know what I hear has worked well, though?” Goldfarb valiantly tried to get back to George Bagnall’s question. “Barrage balloons have cost the Lizards some of their aircraft. They fly so low and so fast they haven’t a prayer of evading if the balloon’s wire happens to lie in their path.”

“Nice to know something does a bit of good,” Bagnall said. “But that wasn’t quite what I meant-not the war, I mean. Just-life.”

“Radarmen don’t have lives,” Jones said. “It’s against His Majesty’s articles of war, or something like that.” He shoved his reemptied pint toward Daphne. “Try not to put so much arsenic in this one, my darling.”

“Why? You’d likely thrive on it.” But the barmaid went to fill the pint again.

“She’s sweet, Daphne is. I can tell that already,” Bagnall said.

“Ah, but you got her on your knee,” Goldfarb said morosely. “Do you know how many months Jerome and I have been trying to do that?”

“Quite a few, by your long face. Aren’t there any other women in Dover?”

“I expect there may be. Have we looked, Jerome?”

“Under every flat stone we could find,” Jones answered. He was watching Douglas Bell and Sylvia. If he’d had a pad in front of him, he’d have taken notes, too.

“I’m going to pour this over your head, dearie,” Daphne told him.

“They say it makes a good hair-set,” he said, adding, “Not that I’d know,” just in time to keep the barmaid from making good on her threat.