Tilting the Balance

The air-raid siren at Bruntingthorpe began to howl. David Goldfarb sprinted for the nearest slit trench. Above the siren came the roar of the Lizards’ jets. It seemed to grow impossibly fast.

Bombs started falling about the time Goldfarb dove headlong into the trench. The ground shook as if it were writhing in pain. Antiaircraft guns hammered. The Lizard planes screamed past at just above treetop height. Their cannon were pounding, too. Through everything, the siren wailed on.

The jets streaked away. The AA around Bruntingthorpe sent a last few futile rounds after them. Shell fragments pattered down from the sky like jagged metal hail. Stunned, half deafened, filthy, his heart pounding madly, Goldfarb climbed to his feet.

He glanced down at his watch. “Bloody hell, ” he muttered, and then, because that didn’t have enough kick, “Gevalt. ” Hardly more than a minute had gone by since the air raid warning began.

In that minute, Bruntingthorpe had http://storeauto.ru been turned upside down. Craters pocked the runway. One of the bombs had struck an airplane in spite of the camouflaged revetment in which it huddled. A column of greasy black smoke rose into the cloudy sky.

Goldfarb looked around. “Oh, bloody fucking hell, ” he said. The Nissen hut where he’d been studying how to fit a radar into the Meteor jet fighter was just a piece of rubble. Part of the curved roof of corrugated galvanized iron had been blown fifty feet away.

The radarman scrambled out of the trench and dashed toward the Nissen hut, which was beginning to burn. “Group Captain Hipple! ” he shouted, and then called in turn the names of the other men with whom he’d been working. A dreadful fear that he would hear no reply rose in him.

Then, one by one, the heads of the RAF officers popped up out of the trench close by the hut. Only the top of Hipple’s cap was visible; be really was very short. “That you, Goldfarb? ” he called. “Are you all right? ”

“Yes, sir, ” Goldfarb said. “Are you? ”

“Quite, thanks, ” Hipple answered, scrambling out spryly. He looked around at the hut, shook his head. “There’s a good deal of work up in smoke. I’m glad we salvaged what we did. ” As the other officers got out, he waved Goldfarb over to see what he meant.

The bottom of the slit trench was covered with manila folders and the papers that had spilled out of them. Goldfarb stared from them to Hipple and back again. “You-all of you-stopped to grab papers when the air raid alarm went off? ”

“Well, the work upon which we are engaged here is of considerable importance, don’t you think? ” Hipple murmured, as if he hadn’t imagined doing anything but what he’d done. He probably hadn’t. Had Goldfarb been in the Nissen hut with the others, the only thing he would have thought about was getting to cover as fast as he could.

Groundcrew men had already emerged from their shelters. They swept and pushed chunks of tarmac off onto the winter-brown grass to either side of the newly hit runways, or else tossed them into the craters the bombs had made. Others started dragging up lengths of pierced steel planking material to put over the holes until they could make more permanent repairs.

Flight Lieutenant Kennan pointed toward the burning aircraft. “I do hope that’s not one of our Pioneers. ”

“Not in that revetment, sir. ” Flight Officer Roundbush shook his head. “It’s only a Hurricane. ”

“Only a Hurricane? ” Kennan looked scandalized; he’d flown one during the Battle of Britain. “Basil, if it weren’t for Hurricanes, you’d have had to trim that mustache of yours down to a toothbrush and start learning German. The Spitfires grabbed the glory-they look like such thoroughbreds, after all-but Hurricanes did more of the work. ”

Roundbush’s hand went protectively to the bushy blond growth on his upper lip. “I beg your pardon, sir. Had I realized the Hurricane stood between my mustache and war’s desolation, I should have spoken of it with more respect-even if it is as obsolete as a Sopwith Camel these days. ”

If possible, Kennan looked even more affronted, not least because Roundbush was in essence right. Indeed, against the Lizards a Sopwith Camel might have been of more use than a Hurricane, simply because it contained very little metal and so was hard for radar to pick up.

Before Kennan could return to the verbal charge, Group Captain Hipple said, “Maurice, Basil, that’s quite enough. ” They shuffled their feet like a couple of abashed schoolboys.

Wing Commander Peary jumped back down into the trench, started rummaging through file folders. “Oh, capital, ” he said a minute later. “We didn’t lose the drawings for the installation of the multifrequency radar in the Meteor fuselage. ”

At the same time as Goldfarb breathed a silent sigh of relief, Basil Roundbush said, “I had to save those. David would have smote me hip and thigh if I’d left them behind. ”

“Heh, ” Goldfarb said. He wondered if Roundbush was using that pseudo-Biblical language to mock his Jewishness. Probably not, he decided. Roundbush made fun of everything on general principles.

“Shall we gather up our goods and see who will give us a temporary home? ” Hipple said. “We shan’t have a hut of our own for a while now. ”

Planes were taking off and landing on the damaged runways by that afternoon. By then, Goldfarb and the RAF officers were back at work in a borrowed corner of the meteorological crew’s Nissen hut. The inside of one of the temporary buildings was so much like that of another that for a few minutes at a time Goldfarb was able to forget he wasn’t where he had been.

The telephone rang. One of the weathermen picked it up, then held it out to Hipple. “Call for you, Group Captain. ”

“Thank you. ” The jet engine specialist took the phone, said, “Hipple here. ” He listened for a couple of minutes, then said, “Oh, that’s first-rate. Yes, we’ll be looking forward to receiving it. Tomorrow morning some time, you say? Yes, that will do splendidly. Thanks so much, for calling. Goodbye. ”

“What was that in aid of? ” Wing Commander Peary asked.