Tilting The Balance (82 page)

“We have decided to produce both explosive metals,” Okamoto answered. “The plutonium project at the moment goes well, but more slowly than expected. We have tried to speed up the uranium hexafluoride project to compensate, but there are difficulties with it. You will evaluate and suggest ways to fix the problems.”

“You don’t expect me to go inside this plant of yours, do you?” Teerts said. “You want me to check it from the outside.”

“Whichever is necessary,” Okamoto answered.

“But one reason you have so much trouble with uranium hexafluoride is that it’s corrosive by nature,” Teerts exclaimed in dismay, his voice turning into a guttural hiss of fright. “If I go in there, I may not come out. And I do not want to breathe either uranium or fluorine, you know.”

“You are a prisoner. What you want is of no importance to me,” Okamoto said. “You can obey or you can face the consequences.”

Ginger lent Teerts spirit he couldn’t have summoned without it. “I am not a physicist,” he shouted, loud enough for the stolid guard who accompanied Okamoto to unsling his rifle for the first time in many days. “I am not an engineer, not a chemist, either. I am a pilot. If you want a pilot’s view of what is wrong with your plant, fine. I do not think it will help you much, though.”

“You are a male of the Race.” Major Okamoto fixed Teerts with a glare from the narrow eyes in that flat, muzzleless face: never had he looked more alien, or more alarming. “By your own boasting, your people have controlled atoms for thousands of years. Of course you will know more about them than we do.”

“Honto!” Nishina said: “That is true.” He went on in Nipponese, slowly, so Teerts could understand: “I was speaking with someone from the Army, telling him what the atomic explosive would be like. He said to me, ‘If you want an explosive, why not just use an explosive?’ Bakatare – idiot!”

Teerts was of the opinion that most Big Uglies were idiots, and that most of the ones who weren’t idiots were savage and vindictive instead. Expressing that opinion struck him as impolitic. He said, “You Tosevites have controlled fire for thousands of years. If someone sent one of you to inspect a factory that makes steel, how much would your report be worth to him?”

He used Nipponese for as much of that as he could, and spoke the rest in his own language. Okamoto interpreted for Nishina. Then, much to Teerts’ delight, the two of them got into a shouting match. The physicist believed Teerts, the major thought he was lying. Finally, grudgingly, Okamoto yielded: “If you don’t think he can be trusted to be accurate, or if you think he truly is too ignorant to be reliable, I must accept your judgment. But I tell you that with proper persuasion he could give us what we need to know.”

“Superior sir, may I speak?” Teerts asked; he’d understood that well enough to respond to it. The surge of pleasure and nerve the ginger had brought was seeping away, leaving him more weary and glum than he would have been had he never set, tongue on the stuff.

Okamoto gave him another baleful stare. “Speak.”

His voice held a clear warning that if Teerts’ words were not very much to the point, he would regret it.

“Superior sir, I just wish to ask you this: have I not cooperated with you since the day I was captured? I have told everything I know about aircraft to the males of your Army and Navy, and I have told everything I know – much more than I thought I knew – to these males here, whom your Professor Nishina leads” – he bowed to the physicist-”even though they are trying to build weapons to harm the Race.”

Okamoto bared his broad, flat teeth. To Teerts, they were unimpressive, being neither very sharp nor very numerous. He did, however, recognize the Big Ugly’s ugly grimace as a threat gesture. Mastering himself, Okamoto answered, “You have cooperated, yes, but you are a prisoner, so you had better cooperate. We have given you better treatment since you showed yourself useful, too: more comfort, more food-”

“Ginger,” Teerts added. He wasn’t sure whether he was agreeing with Okamoto or contradicting him. The herb made him feel wonderful while he tasted it, but the Big Uglies weren’t giving it to him for his benefit: they wanted to use it to warp him to their will. He didn’t think they had, so far – but how could he be sure?

“Ginger, hai,”Okamoto said. “Suppose I tell you that, after you go look at this uranium hexafluoride setup, we will give you not just ginger powder with your rice and fish, but pickled ginger root, as much as you can eat? You’d go then, neh?”

As much ginger as he could eat… did Tosev 3 hold that much ginger? The craving rose up and grabbed Teerts, like a hand around his throat. He needed all his will to say, “Superior sir, what good is ginger to me if I am not alive to taste it?”

Okamoto scowled again. He turned back to Nishina. “If he is not going to inspect the facility, do you have any more use for him today?” The physicist shook his head. To Teerts, Okamoto said, “Come along, then. I will take you back to your cell.”

Teerts followed Okamoto out of the laboratory. The guard followed them both. Even through the melancholy he felt after ginger’s exaltation left him, Teerts felt something akin to triumph.

That triumph faded as he went out onto the streets of Tokyo. Even more man than he had in Harbin, he felt himself a mote among the vast swarms of Big Uglies in those streets. He’d been alone in Harbin, yes, but the Race was advancing on the mainland city; had things gone well, he could have been reunited with his own kith at any time. But things had not gone well.

Here in Tokyo, even the illusion of rescue was denied him. Sea protected the islands at the heart of the Tosevite empire of Nippon from immediate invasion by the Race. He was irremediably and permanently at the mercy of the Big Uglies. They stared at him as he walked down the street; hatred seemed to rise from them in almost visible waves, like heat from red glowing iron. For once, he was glad to be between Major Okamoto and the guard.

Tokyo struck him as a curious mixture. Some of the buildings were of stone and glass, others – more and more outside the central city – of wood and what looked like thick paper. The two styles seemed incompatible, as if they’d hatched from different eggs. He wondered how and why they coexisted here.

Air-raid sirens began to wail. As if by magic, the streets emptied. Okamoto led Teerts into a packed shelter in the basement of one of the stone-and-glass buildings. Outside, antiaircraft guns started pounding. Teerts hoped all the Race’s pilots – males from his flight, perhaps – would return safely to their bases.

“Do you wonder why we hate you, when you do this to us?” Okamoto asked as the sharp, deep blasts of bombs contributed to the racket.

“No, superior sir,” Teerts answered. He understood it, well enough – and what it would do to him, sooner or later. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that. For the first time since he’d resigned himself to captivity, he began looking for ways to escape. He found none, but vowed to himself to keep looking.

Wearing His Majesty’s uniform once more felt most welcome to David Goldfarb. The ribbon of the Military Medal, in the colors of the Union Jack, held a new place of pride just above his left breast pocket. He’d imagined the only way a radarman could win a ground combat medal was to have the Jerries or the Lizards invade England. Going to Poland as a commando hadn’t been what he’d had in mind.

Bruntingthorpe had changed in the weeks he’d been away. More and more Pioneer and Meteor jet fighters sheltered in revetments. The place was becoming a working air base rather than an experimental station. But Fred Hippie’s team for evaluating Lizard engines and radars still worked here – and, Goldfarb had not been surprised to discover on his return, still shared a Nissen hut with the meteorologists. The one they had occupied was replaced, but somebody else worked in it these days.

He traded greetings with his comrades as he went in and got ready to go to work. The stuff brewing in the pot above the spirit lamp wasn’t exactly tea, but with plenty of honey it was drinkable. He poured himself a cup, adulterated it to taste, and went over to the Lizard radar unit.

It hadn’t languished while he’d been performing deeds of derring-do and speaking Yiddish. Another radarman, an impossibly young-looking fellow named Leo Horton, had made a good deal of progress on it in the interim.

“Morning to you,” Morton said in a nasal Devonshire accent.

“Morning,” Goldfarb agreed. He sipped the not-quite-tea, hoping this morning’s batch would carry a jolt. You couldn’t gauge that in advance these days. Sometimes you could drink it by the gallon and do nothing but put your kidneys through their paces; sometimes half a cup would open your eyes wide as hangar doors. It all depended on what went into the witches’ brew on any given day.

“I think I’ve made sense of some more of the circuitry,” Morton said. He was frightfully clever, with a theoretical background in electronics and physics Goldfarb couldn’t come close to matching. He also had a fine head for beer and, perhaps not least because he made them feel motherly, was cutting quite a swath through the barmaids up in Leicester. He reminded Goldfarb of an improved model of Jerome Jones, which was plenty to make him feel inadequate.

But business was business. “Good show,” Goldfarb said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

“You see this set of circuits here?” Morton pointed to an area of the disassembled radar not far from the magnetron. “I’m pretty sure it controls the strength of the signal.”

“You know, I suspected that before I got drafted away from here,” Goldfarb said. “I didn’t have the chance to test it, though. What’s your evidence?”

Morton opened a fat notebook with a cover almost the exact dark blue of his
RAF
uniform. “Here, look at these oscilloscope readings when I shunt power through this lead here-”

He pointed again to show which one he meant.

“I think you’re right,” Goldfarb said. “And look at the amplification.” He whistled softly. “We wouldn’t just be promoted-we’d be bloody knighted if we found out how the Lizards do this and we could fit it into our own sets.”

“Too true, but good luck,” Morton replied. “I can tell you what those circuits do, but I will be damned if I have the, slightest notion of how they do it. If you took one of our Lanes and landed it at a Royal Flying Corps base in 1914 – not that you could, because no runways then were anywhere near long enough – the mechanics then would stand a better chance of understanding the aircraft and all its systems than we do of making sense of – this.” He jabbed a thumb at the Lizard radar.

“It’s not quite so bad as that,” Goldfarb said. “Group Captain Hippie and his crew have made good progress with the engines.”

“Oh, indeed. But he’d already figured out the basic principles involved.”

“We have the basic principles of radar,” Goldfarb protested. “But their radar is further ahead of ours than their jet engines are,” Horton said. “It’s just the quality of the metallurgy that drives the group captain mad. Here, the Lizards are using a whole different technology to achieve their results: no valves, everything so small the circuits only come clear under the microscope. Figuring out what anything does is a triumph; figuring out how it does it is a wholly different question.”

“Don’t I know it,” Goldfarb said ruefully. “There have been days – and plenty of ‘em – when I’d sooner have kicked that bleeding radar out onto the rubbish pitch than worked on it.”

“Ah, but you have managed to get away for a bit.” Morton pointed to the Military Medal ribbon on Goldfarb’s chest. “I wish I’d had the chance to try to earn one of those.”

Remembering terror and flight, Goldfarb started to say he would have been just as glad not to have had the opportunity. But that wasn’t really true. Getting his cousin Moishe and his family out of Poland had been worth doing; he knew only pride that he’d been able to help there.

The other thing he noted, with a small shock, was the edge of genuine envy in Morton’s voice. The new radarman’s savvy had intimidated him ever since he got back to Bruntingthorpe. Finding out that Morton admired him was like a tonic. He remembered the gap that had existed back at Dover between those who went up to do battle in the air and those who stayed behind and fought their war with electrons and phosphors.

But Goldfarb had crossed to the far side of that gap. Even before he went to Poland, he’d gone aloft in a Lancaster to test the practicability of airborne radar sets. He’d taken Lizard fire then, too, but returned safely. Ground combat, though, was something else again, If one of those Lizard rockets had struck the Lane, he never would have seen the alien who killed him. Ground combat was personal. He’d shot people and Lizards in Lodz and watched them fall. He still had nasty dreams about it.

Leo Morton was still waiting for an answer. Goldfarb said, “In the long run, what we do here will have more effect on how the war ends than anything anyone accomplishes gallivanting about with a bloody knife between his teeth.”

“You go gallivanting about with a knife between your teeth and it’ll turn bloody in short order, that’s for certain,” Morton said.

Flight Officer Basil Roundbush came in and poured himself a cup of ersatz tea. His broad, ruddy face lit up in a smile. “Not bad today, by Jove,” he said.

“Probably does taste better after you run it through that soup strainer you’ve got on your upper lip,” Goldfarb said.

“You’re a cheeky bugger, you know that?” Roundbush took a step toward Goldfarb, as if in anger. Goldfarb needed a distinct effort of will to stand his ground; he gave away three or four inches and a couple of stone in weight. Not only that, Roundbush wore a virtual constellation of pot metal and bright ribbons on his chest. He’d flown Spitfires against the Luftwaffe in what then looked to be Britain’s darkest hour.

“Just a joke, sir,” Morton said hastily.

“You’re new here,” Roundbush said, his voice amused. “I know it’s a joke, and what’s more, Goldfarb there knows I know. Isn’t that right, Goldfarb?” His expression defied the radarman to deny it.

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Goldfarb answered, “Although one can’t be too certain with a man who grows such a vile caricature of a mustache.”