In the Balance

Suddenly the absurdity of it all was too much for Goldfarb. He forced his way out through the crowd that jammed the White Horse Inn, then stood on the sidewalk wondering where to go next. The first breath of frosty air in his lungs, the nip of night against his nose, loudly insisted leaving had been a mistake. But he couldn’t make himself go back into the pub.

The night was clear. Stars burned in the dark sky, more stars than he ever remembered seeing in the days before the blackout. The Milky Way shone like sparkling sugar crystals spilled across a black tile floor. Before the Lizards came, the stars had been friendly, or at worst remote. Now they felt dangerous, as any enemy’s homeland would.

To the south, the gray stone pile of Dover Castle concealed some of those stars from view. The Saxons had had a fort there. When Louis VIII failed to take the place in 1216, it likely staved off a French invasion of England. Henry VIII had added to it, and more brickwork had gone up against another feared French invader, Napoleon. Later in the nineteenth century, a turret with a sixteen-inch gun was added to ward the port from attack by sea.

But the turret designers never foresaw attack by air. Goldfarb’s own radar masts had done more to defend Dover, to defend all of England, from Hitler’s wrath than all the stone and brickwork put together. Against the Lizards, even the wizardry of radar seemed, if not futile, then surely inadequate.

A little red dot, fainter than a summer glowworm, came floating down St. James Street toward him. His hand twitched; he hadn’t had a cigarette in it for a long time. With imports even of food cut first by German submarines and then by Lizard aircraft, tobacco had all but disappeared.

During the Depression, people had scooped cigarette butts out of the gutter to smoke. Goldfarb was never reduced to that, though the scorn he’d felt the first time he saw it had dwindled first to pity and then to acceptance. But that scavenging sprang from a shortage of money, not a shortage of cigarettes.

Now Goldfarb called to whoever hid behind that seductively burning coal, “Here, friend, have you got another fag you can sell me?”

The smoker stopped. The lit end of the cigarette glowed brighter for a moment, then moved as its owner shifted it to the side of his mouth. “Sorry, chum, I’m down to my last three, and I won’t sell ’em: I couldn’t use the money on anything I’d sooner have. But you can take a drag off this one, if you like.”

Goldfarb hesitated; in a way, that struck him as worse than nipping up fag-ends. But the unseen smoker sounded kindly. Even if he wouldn’t give up what he had, he’d share a little. “Thanks,” Goldfarb said, and stepped quickly forward.

He held the single lungful of smoke as long as he could, let it out with real regret. The owner of the cigarette puffed again. In the faint crimson glow, his face was rapt with pleasure. “Bloody war,” he said on the exhale.

“Too right,” Goldfarb said. He coughed; however much he liked it, his body was out of the habit of smoking. “I wonder what we’ll run short of next. Tea, maybe.”

“There’s a horrible thought. You’re likely right, though. Don’t raise a lot of bloody tea in the fields of Kent, eh?”

“No,” Goldfarb said morosely. He wondered what he’d do when his morning cuppa ran out. He’d do without, was what he’d do. “What did we do before there was tea?”

“Drank beer, I expect.” The smoker carefully extinguished the cigarette. “That’s what I’m about to do now. Don’t want to go in there with this lit, though. I’ve heard of men knocked over the head for a pipe’s ’orth of tobacco, and I don’t fancy it happening to me.”

“Clever,” Goldfarb said, nodding. “There’s enough smoke inside already that no one will smell it on you.”

“My very thought.” Now the other man was just a voice in the darkness. He went on, “I might want to try and get close to that redheaded barmaid they have here, too-what’s her name?”

“Sylvia,” Goldfarb said dully.

“Sylvia, that’s right. Have you seen her?” Without waiting for an answer, the smoker added, “I’d spend a cigarette on her, I would.” He found the door to the White Horse Inn by ear, slipped inside.

Goldfarb stood out in the cold a few seconds longer, then started the long hike back to his quarters. He didn’t think Sylvia could be bought for a fag, but what did it matter? She wasn’t his now, and she’d never really been his. Slaking your lust was all very well-was, when you got down to it, better than all very well-but you had to be sensible about it. If that was all you were doing with a woman, stopping oughtn’t to be the end of the world.

Far away, like distant screams, he heard the shriek of Lizard aircraft engines. His shiver had nothing to do with the cold. He wondered who was up in the night sky with a balky radar, and whether the chap would make it back to the ground again.