Upsetting the Balance

So Goldfarb thought, at any rate, till Basil Roundbush said, “This Mark is on the underpowered side, but they’re working on new engines that should really pep up the performance.”

“Overwhelming enough for me already, thanks,” the radarman said. ‘What’s our ceiling in this aircraft?”

“Just over forty thousand feet,” Roundbush replied. “We’ll be there in less than half an hour, and we’ll be able to see quite a long ways, I expect.”

“I expect you’re right,” Goldfarb said, breathing rubbery air through his oxygen mask. The Lancaster in which he’d flown before had taken almost twice as long to climb a little more than half as high, and Roundbush was complaining about this machine’s anemia! In a way, that struck Goldfarb as absurd. In another way, given what the pilot would have to face, it seemed only reasonable.

The Meteor banked gently. Through puffs of fluffy white cloud, Goldfarb peered out through the Perspex of the cockpit at the green patchwork quilt of the English countryside. “Good show this isn’t a few months ago,” Roundbush remarked casually. “Time was when the ack-ack crews would start shooting at the mere sound of a jet engine, thinking it had to belong to the Lizards. Some of our Pioneers and Meteors took shrapnel damage on that account, though none of them was shot down.”

“Urk,” Goldfarb said; perhaps luckily, that hadn’t occurred to him. Down in Dover, the antiaircraft crew had opened up at the roar of jets without a second thought.

“How’s the radar performing?” Roundbush asked, reminding him of why they were flying the mission.

He checked the cathode-ray tubes. Strange to think he could see farther and in greater detail with them than with his eyes, especially when, from this airy eyrie, he seemed to be the king of infinite space, with the whole world set out below for his inspection. “Everything seems to be performing as it should,” he said cautiously. “I have a couple of blips that, by their height and speed, are our own aircraft. Could you fly a southerly course, to let me search for Lizard machines?”

“Changing course to one-eight-zero,” Roundbush said, obliging as a Victorian carriage driver acknowledging his toff of a master’s request to convey him to Boodle’s. Like a proper fighter pilot, he peered ahead and in all directions as the Meteor swung through its turn. “I don’t see anything.”

Goldfarb didn’t see anything, either; his screens remained serenely blank. In a way, that was disappointing. In another way, it was a relief: if he could see the Lizards, they assuredly could also see him-and Roundbush had made no bones about their planes’ remaining far superior to the Meteor.

Then, off in the electronic distance, he thought he detected something-and then, an instant later, the radar screens went crazy with noise, as if the aurora borealis had decided to dance on them. “I’m getting interference,” Goldfarb said urgently. “I spied what seemed to be a Lizard plane, right at the edge of where the set could reach, and then everything turned to hash-which means he likely detected me, too.”

“Which also means we’re apt to have a rocket or two pay us a visit in the not too distant future,” Roundbush said. “I don’t propose to wait around for them, all things considered.”

He threw the Meteor into a dive that left Goldfarb’s stomach some miles behind and thousands of feet above the aircraft. He gulped and did his best to keep his breakfast down; vomiting while you were wearing oxygen gear was not a good idea. Roundbush didn’t make it easy, twisting the plane from side to side in evasive maneuvers violent enough to make the wings groan in protest. Goldfarb suspected he was stretching the Meteor’s performance envelope, and hoped it had enough stretch in it.

The radarman had shut down his set to keep any rockets from homing on its signal. Now he was just a passenger, useless weight, as Roundbush shed altitude. The ground rushed up as if thrown at him. Not knowing whether the Lizards had fired and missed or contented themselves with simply scrambling his signal made the descent all the more harrowing.

The first thing he said when the nose wheel touched down at Bruntingthorpe was, “Thank you.” The next thing was, “We have a bit more work ahead of us, haven’t we?”

Teerts was getting quite handy with the eating sticks the Nipponese used. He shoveled rice with bits of raw fish into his mouth, hardly spilling a grain or a morsel. The Big Uglies were feeding him better than they had when they first took him prisoner. He shuddered. They could hardly feed him worse.

Hishashi discovered a thin, reddish piece of pickled ginger. He picked it up, turned both eye turrets toward it. Not so long ago, he’d been a killercraft pilot, a proud male of the conquest fleet of the Race. Now, thanks to bad luck, he was a prisoner in an empire of Big Uglies convinced that no worthy warrior ever let himself be taken prisoner. To help squeeze all they could out of him, they’d addicted him to this perfidious Tosevite herb.