Upsetting the Balance

As the driver had said, they got into Watnall in the middle of the night. The transition was abrupt: one minute they were rolling through open country, the next in among Nissen huts and Maycrete buildings that seemed to have sprung from the middle of nowhere-which made a pretty fair description of Watnall, now that Goldfarb thought on it. They rattled by a couple of ack-ack guns, whose crews jeered at them: “Coming back to work are you at last, dearies? Did you have a pleasant holiday?”

“Bugger off,” Goldfarb said, which summed up his comrades’ responses pretty well, too. The ack-ack gunners laughed.

Henry said, “What they were shootin’ at, it were up in the sky, and they weren’t in range of the bleedin’ Lizards every minute of every bleedin’ day. ‘Ad it right soft, they did, you ask me.”

“Amen to that,” Goldfarb said, and the other RAF men on the wagon added not only agreement but profane embellishment. If you weren’t a pilot, you were probably safer in the RAF than as an infantryman. You certainly lived softer in the RAF than in the poor bloody infantry, as you learned if you found yourself at the thin end of the wedge on the ground, the way Goldfarb had.

The driver pulled back on the reins. His two-horse team stopped. One of the animals bent its head and began pulling up grass. “Taxi ride’s done, lads,” the driver said. He pointed, “You go over there now.”

“Over there” was a Nissen hut, its semicylindrical bulk black against the slightly lighter sky. Goldfarb scrambled down from the wagon. He led the way toward the hut. Several of the other RAF men hung back, grumbling. He was glad he’d be returning to a job that could use his special skills. Any bloke could make an infantryman.

He opened the door and pushed his way through two blackout curtains. The light inside came from candles and lanterns, not electric fixtures, but still seemed bright to his night-accustomed eyes. A tired-looking flight sergeant waved him over to a desk piled high with forms. “All right, let’s see what we can do with you,” he said. He examined Goldfarb’s draggled uniform. “You’ve not had the easiest time of it, seems like.”

Goldfarb shrugged. “You do what you have to do.”

“That’s the way of it,” the flight sergeant said, nodding. He pulled out a form and a short nub of pencil. “Very good-stand and deliver.” Goldfarb rattled off his name-surname first, Christian name (an irony in his case), middle initial-rank, and service number. The flight sergeant wrote them down, then asked, “And your speciality, uh, Goldfarb?”

“I’m a radarman, sir.”

The flight sergeant started to write that down, too, then looked up sharply at Goldfarb. “Radarman? Somebody should have his bloody head examined, turning you into a ground-pounding Tommy. How the devil did that happen?”

“Sir, I was on duty south of Leicester when the Lizards hit my establishment. We beat them back, but they wrecked the place and scattered us to the four winds. I fell in with some soldiers, and-” He spread his hands. “You know how it is, sir. I was separated from my unit, but I still wanted to fight, and so I did.”

The flight sergeant sighed. “If I had a farthing for every time I’ve heard that story this past fortnight, I’d be the richest man in England, sure as hell. But a radarman-” His grin suddenly made him look younger than he had. “I’ll get a ‘well done’ for coming up with you, I will. What was your establishment, and what were you doing there?”

“I don’t like to say, sir,” Goldfarb answered. Radar had been a secret vital to conceal from the Germans when the war was young. The Lizards knew more about radar than any Englishman was likely to learn for the next generation, but old habits died hard.

“What was your establishment, and what did you do there?” the flight sergeant repeated with the air of a man used to cutting through multiple layers of nonsense. “Don’t waste my time.”

The rest of the RAF men stood before other desks, giving out their service records. Goldfarb surrendered: “Sir, I was at Bruntingthorpe, working under Group Captain Hipple to fit radar into Meteor jets and to see what we could learn from captured Lizard radars.”

“Then you bloody well ought to be court-martialed for letting anybody-and I mean up to field-marshal’s rank-take you away from what you were doing,” the flight sergeant said. At Goldfarb’s alarmed expression, he went on, “Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen. But getting yourself shot up would have been a bloody waste.”

“Sir, Bruntingthorpe had taken a hiding,” Goldfarb said defensively. “I don’t even know if Group Captain Hipple is alive or dead.”

“If he’s dead, someone else will be minding that store.” The flight sergeant spoke with conviction. “And if everyone above you has bought his plot, why, then the store is yours.”

“Mine?” Goldfarb was mortified when his voice rose to a startled squeak, but couldn’t help it. He stammered on: “I’m-I don’t know enough on my own. I-”