Striking the Balance

Mordechai sent her a grateful look. She took this whole business as seriously as he did. Given the levelheadedness she usually displayed, that was a sign it needed to be taken seriously.

“So we listen. So what?” Gruver said. “If he’s that good, we won’t hear anything. We won’t spot him unless he wants to be spotted, and we won’t know what he’s up to till he decides to hit us.”

“All of which is true, and none of which means we can stop trying,” Anielewicz said. He slammed his open hand into the side of the fire engine. That hurt his hand more than the engine. “If only I’d been certain I recognized him! If only I’d come out of-where I came out of-a few seconds earlier, so I could have seen his face. If, If, if-” It ate at him.

“Even thinking he was in Lodz put us on alert,” Bertha said. “Who knows what he might have done if he’d got here without our knowing it?”

“He turned a corner,” Anielewicz said, running it through his mind again like a piece of film from the cinema. “He turned a corner, and then another one, very quickly. The second time, I had to guess which way he’d gone, and I guessed wrong.”

“Don’t keep beating yourself over the head with it, Mordechai,” Bertha said. “It can’t be helped now, and you did everything you could.”

“That’s so,” Gruver rumbled. “No doubt about it”

Anielewicz hardly heard him. He was looking at Bertha Fleishman. She’d never called him by his first name before, not that he remembered. He would have remembered, too; he was certain of that.

She was looking at him, too. She flushed a little when their eyes met, but she didn’t look away. He’d known she liked him well enough. He liked her well enough, too. Except when she smiled, she was plain and mousy. He’d been to bed with women far prettier. He suddenly seemed to hear Solomon Gruver’s deep voice again, going,So what? Gruver-that-wasn’t had a point. He’d bedded those women and enjoyed himself doing it, but he hadn’t for an instant thought of spending his life with any of them. Bertha, though…

“If we live through this-” he said. The five words made a complete sentence. If you knew how to listen to them.

Bertha Fleishman did. “Yes. If we do,” she replied: a complete answer.

The real Solomon Gruver seemed less attentive to what was going on around him than the imaginary one inside Anielewicz’s head. “If we live through this,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something better with that thing we have than leaving it where it is. But if we move it now, we just draw attention to it, and that lets this Skorzenymamzer have his chance.”

“That’s all true, Solomon-every word of it,” Mordechai agreed solemnly. Then he started to laugh. A moment later, so did Bertha.

“And what is so funny?” Gruver demanded with ponderous dignity. “Did I make a joke and, God forbid, not know it?”

“God forbid,” Anielewicz said, and laughed harder.

As George Bagnall and Ken Embry walked to Dover College, jet engines roared overhead. Bagnall’s automatic reaction was to find the nearest hole in the ground and jump into it. With an effort, he checked himself and looked upward. For once, the thinking, rational part of his brain had got it right: those were Meteors up there, not Lizard fighter-bombers.

“Bloody hell!” Embry burst out; conditioned reflex must nearly have got the better of him, too. “We’ve only been gone a year and a half, but it feels as though we’ve stepped back into 1994, not 1944.”

“Doesn’t it just,” Bagnall agreed. “They were flying those things when we left, but not many of them. You don’t see Hurricanes at all any more, and they’re phasing out Spitfires fast as they can. It’s a brave new world, and no mistake.”

“Still a place for bomber crew-for the next twenty minutes, anyhow,” Embry said. “They haven’t put jets on Lancs, not yet they haven’t. But everything else they have done-” He shook his head. “No wonder they sent us back to school. We’re almost as obsolete as if we’d been flying Sopwith Camels. Trouble is, of course, we haven’t been flyinganything.”

“It’s even worse for Jones,” Bagnall said. “We’re still flying the same buses, even if they have changed the rest of the rules. His radars are starting to come from a different world: literally.”

“Same with our bomb-aiming techniques,” Embry said as they climbed the poured-concrete steps and strode down the corridor toward their classroom.

The lecturer there, a flight lieutenant named Constantine Jordan, was already scribbling on the blackboard, though it still lacked a couple of minutes of the hour. Bagnall looked around as he took his seat. Most of his classmates had a pale, pasty look to them; some were in obvious if stifled pain. That made sense-besides the rarities like Bagnall and Embry, the people who’d been out of service long enough to require refresher courses were the ones who’d been badly wounded. A couple had dreadful scars on their faces; what lay under their uniforms was anyone’s guess, though not one Bagnall cared to make.