Upsetting the Balance

“Too bloody right.” Goldfarb waved to the Sten guns and spare magazines that had gone up on hooks and in bins on the walls of the hut, ready to be grabbed. “I suppose those are there to make us feel like soldiers, even if we’re not.”

Roundbush laughed, but without much humor. “That’s well put. I never should have learned so blinking much. If I were just a pilot, I’d be in there battling, not chained to a draughtsman’s table away from it all.”

One of the meteorologists said, “If you were just a pilot, you’d have been in there battling all along, and odds are you’d’ve long since bought your plot.”

“Oh, bugger off, Ralph,” Basil Roundbush said. For a crack like that, he would have beaten most men to a jelly, but Ralph Wiggs had had an artificial leg since the day when, a generation before, he’d gone over the top at the Somme. Having seen that and been lucky enough to survive it, he knew everything worth knowing about senseless slaughter.

Now he said, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, lad. I tried to get back into it, too-if they’d take Tin-Legs Bader to fly a Spit with both legs gone, why wouldn’t they take me to fight with just one? Blighters said I’d best serve His Majesty by keeping an eye on air pressure and wind direction.”

“It’s a filthy job, Ralph, but someone’s got to do it,” Roundbush said. “I just wish I’d never heard of turbines. Teach me to be an engineer-”

Goldfarb couldn’t make complaints like that. If he hadn’t been mad for wireless sets and the like before the war, he wouldn’t have become a radarman in the first place; he’d have gone straight into the infantry. He might have come back from Dunkirk, but then again he might not have. So many good chaps hadn’t.

He stuck a lead onto one of the subunits he and Leo Horton had salvaged from the radar of a crashed Lizard fighter. Little by little, they were figuring out what the unit did, if not always how it did it.

Just as he was about to take his first reading, the air-raid alarm began to wail. Swearing in English and Yiddish, he dashed for the trench right outside the Nissen hut and jumped down into it.

Basil Roundbush landed almost on top of him. The flight officer clattered as he dove into the trench; on the way out, he’d grabbed several Sten guns and enough ammunition to fight a small war. When the first Lizard plane screamed overhead, he fired off a long burst. “Just on the off chance, don’t you know,” he shouted to Goldfarb through the hellish din.

Bombs slammed down all around, jerking them and the other men in the trench around like so many rag dolls. “Odd pattern,” Goldfarb remarked; he’d become something of a connoisseur of bombing runs. “Usually they go after the runways, but it sounds more as though they were hitting the buildings today.” He stuck up his head. “That’s what they were doing, all right.”

Most of the huts and barracks and other buildings of the Bruntingthorpe Experimental Air Station had just taken a dreadful pounding. The Nissen hut from which he’d fled was still intact, but all its windows had blown in.

Roundbush also peered this way and that. “You’re right-not a scratch on the runways,” he said. “That isn’t like the Lizards, not even a little bit. It’s almost as if they wanted them-” His voice faded before the last word: “-intact.”

No sooner had that passed his lips than Goldfarb’s battered ears caught a thuttering roar from out of the south. It seemed to be coming from the air, but he’d never heard anything like it. Then he caught sight of something that reminded him of a tadpole slung beneath an electric fan. “Helicopter!” he yelled.

“Helicopters,” Roundbush corrected grimly. “And they’re coming this way-probably want to seize the airstrip.”

Goldfarb kept his head up another moment. Then one of the helicopters let loose with a salvo of rockets. He threw himself flat again. Several of them tore into the Nissen hut; a piece of hot corrugated iron landed on him like an overaggressive player in a rugby scrum. “Oof!” he said. A couple of precious Meteors blew up in their revetments.

The radarman started to shake the slab of metal off and get up, but Roundbush sat on him. “Stay low, you bloody fool!” the flight officer shouted. As if to underscore his words, machine-gun bullets kicked up dirt all around. When a fighter plane strafed you, it made its pass and flew on. The helicopters hung in the air and kept shooting and shooting.

Over the racket of the guns, Goldfarb said, “I think Group Captain Hipple’s research team has just broken up.”

“Too bloody right it has,” Roundbush answered.