Upsetting the Balance

Goldfarb finished his bitter, too, then held up a hand to buy a round in turn. That was inviolable pub custom: two men together, two rounds; four men together, four rounds; eight men together and they’d all go home half blind.

Stella took her time about noticing a mere radarman, but Goldfarb’s half-a-crown spent as well as anyone else’s. When she went off to get change, though, she didn’t put as much into her walk for him as she had for Roundbush.

The pilot said, “We’d be better off still if we had guided rockets like the Lizards’. Then we’d knock their planes out of the sky at twenty miles, as they can with us. Once we’re inside gun range, we have an almost decent chance, but getting there, as the saying goes, is half the fun.”

“Yes, I know about that,” Goldfarb said. The Lizards had fired radar-homing rockets at his Lanc. Turning off the radar made them miss, but a turned-off radar was of even less use than no radar at all, because it added weight and made the aircraft that carried it slower and less maneuverable.

“Good. One less thing to have to brief you about.” Roundbush poured down his pint, apparently in one long swallow, then waved to get Stella’s attention. “We’ll just have ourselves another one before we toddle on back to base.”

Another one turned into another two: Goldfarb insisted on buying a matching round. Part of that was pub custom. Another part was a conscious effort on his part to give the lie to Jews’ reputation for stinginess. His parents, products of a harsher world than England, had drilled into him that he should never let himself become a spectacle for the gentiles.

Pedaling back to the airbase with four pints of best bitter in him gave a whole new meaning to Roundbush’s mock-aristocratic “toddling.” He was glad he wasn’t trying to drive a car. He expected to have a thick head come morning, but nothing that would keep him from doing his work, and certainly nothing that would keep him from flying the next afternoon.

The headache with which he did wake up wasn’t what left him abstracted when he headed for the Nissen hut Hipple’s team shared with the meteorological staff. He had his mind too focused on the flight ahead to be as efficient as he might have been in trying to decipher the secrets of a captured Lizard radar, though.

Basil Roundbush had had more than four pints the night before-how many more, Goldfarb didn’t know-but seemed fresh as a daisy. He was whistling a tune the radarman hadn’t heard. Flight Lieutenant Maurice Kennan looked up from a sheaf of three-view drawings and said, “That’s as off-key as it is off-color, which is saying something.”

“Thank you, sir,” Roundbush said cheerfully, which made Kennan return to his drawings in a hurry. If Roundbush hadn’t been a flier, he would have made a masterful psychological warfare officer.

Goldfarb’s pretense of its being a normal day broke down about ten o’clock, when Leo Horton, a fellow radarman, nudged him in the ribs and whispered, “You lucky sod.” After that, he was only pretending to work.

An hour or so later, Roundbush walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. “What say we go don our shining armor and make sure our steed is ready to ride?” From another man, the Arthurian language would have sounded asinine. He was not only a spirit blithe enough to carry it off without self-consciousness, he’d fought a great many aerial jousts already. Goldfarb nodded and got up from his desk.

The flight suit of leather and fur was swelteringly hot in the bright sunshine of an English summer’s day, but Goldfarb zipped zippers and fastened catches without complaint. Three or four miles straight up and it wouldn’t be summery any more. For that matter, the Meteor surely had a higher ceiling than the trudging Lanc in which he’d flown before.

In the Lancaster, he’d tended the radar in the cavernous space of the bomb bay. In the new two-seater version of the Meteor, he sat behind the pilot in a stretched cockpit. The radar set itself was mounted behind and below him in the fuselage; only the controls and the screens were where he could get at them. If something went wrong with the unit, he’d have to wait till he was back on the ground to fiddle with it.

Groundcrew men pulled the plane out of its sandbagged, camouflaged revetment and onto the runway. Goldfarb had heard jet engines a great number of times, but being in an aircraft whose engines were being started was a new experience, and one he could have done without: it reminded him of nothing so much as taking up residence inside a dentist’s drill. “Bit noisy, what?” Roundbush bawled through the interphone.

The moment the Meteor began to taxi, Goldfarb realized he’d traded a brewery horse for a thoroughbred. The engine noise grew even more appalling, but the fighter sprang into the air and climbed as if it were shot from a boy’s catapult.