Other Earths (23 page)

 

 

W
ith the ambulance sealed and the Rutherford counter ticking nice and slowly, we cleared the hospital checkpoint and sped through the lanes to Sandhurst and Rye, then took the main road east to Walland Marsh and the junction at Brenzett to New Romney. It had been sunny when we departed, but as we neared the coast, the sky turned leaden and overcast, with a silvery-gray mist keeping visibility to a mile or so. The coast road to Dungeness was a patchwork of repairs, with the newest craters either barricaded off or spanned by temporary metal plates. Ralph took it all in his stride, swerving the ambulance this way and that as if he had driven this road a thousand times, never once letting our speed drop under forty miles per hour. I held onto the dashboard as the ambulance lurched from side to side, creaking on its suspension. Ralph wasn’t my normal driver, and he took a bit of getting used to.

“Not getting seasick are you, Wally?” he asked, with a big smile.

“In an ambulance, sir?”

“It’s just that you look a bit green!”

“I’m fine, sir—right as rain.”

“You’re in safe hands, don’t worry about that.”

Between jolts I asked: “Been driving long, have you, sir?”

“Twenty years or so, on and off. Started off a sergeant with the Special Constabulary Unit, then got myself signed up as a private with the London Field Ambulance.”

“In France were you, sir, before the retreat?”

“Steady, lad. If the Patriotic League catches you calling it that, they’ll have your guts for garters. It’s the ‘consolidation,’ remember. Well, I was there—doing this job. So was Ravel—he was driving for the French, though, and we never met again.”

“Ravel, sir?”

“Old teacher of mine. A long time ago now.”

I didn’t know much about Ralph, truth be told. Mr. Vaughan Williams was his name, but no one ever called him anything other than Ralph, or sometimes Uncle Ralph. He was a familiar face at Cranbrook, always organizing a singsong around the mess piano. They say he used to be a composer, and quite a good one, although I’d never heard of him. Most of the chaps liked him because he didn’t have any airs and graces, even though you could tell he was from a good background. I guessed he was about sixty, but strong with it, as if he could go on for a few more years without any trouble. There were plenty like him around: men who had signed up at the start of the war, when they were still in their early forties, and who had hung on ever since. Sometimes when I listened to Mr. Chamberlain’s speeches on the wireless, I wondered if I’d still be around in twenty years, with an ambulance mate young enough to be my son.

We passed a gun emplacement that was still in use, two barrels sticking out at an angle, like a pair of fingers telling the Huns where to shove it, and then another one that had been bombed, so that it was just a broken shell, like a concrete-gray hat box that had been stepped on; then we slowed for a checkpoint at a striped kiosk hemmed in with sandbags. The guards had boxes hung around their necks, stuffed with masks in case the gas alarm went off. We were waved through without stopping, and then it was a clear dash along another mile or so of chalky road with barbed wire on both sides. Out of the mist loomed a tall shape, the same gray color as the gun emplacements, and a little further along the road was a similar shape and a third barely visible beyond that. From a distance they looked like tall gray tombstones sticking out of the land. Drawing nearer I saw that the structures were all alike, although I still had no idea of what they were. I couldn’t see any doors or windows or gun slits, at least not from the angle we were approaching.

“I don’t suppose you have much idea what this is all about,” Ralph said. “Never having been to Dungeness, after all. There are some other stations at Hythe and up the coast at Sunderland, but I don’t imagine you’ve been there either.”

“No, sir,” I admitted.

“What were you doing before you ended up with the Corps?”

“Artillery, sir. Antiaircraft emplacement at Selsey.”

“Shoot down much?”

“A few spotter planes. One flying wing and a couple of zeppelins. Then I got wounded in Sevenoaks.”

We passed the first shape. Because the road snaked a bit, I was able to see that the front of the object didn’t have any doors or windows either, and no sign of gun slits. The main part was a big concrete bowl with a thick rim, tilted almost onto its side so that it faced out to sea like a great curved ear. The bowl was easily fifty or sixty feet across, and its lower rim was about thirty feet off the ground. It was attached—or cast as part of—a heavy supporting wall with sloping sides made of the same dreary gray concrete. A windowless hut was positioned under the rim of the bowl, and rising from the roof of this hut was a metal tower that ended in a pole, sticking up so that it was in front of the middle part of the bowl.

“They’ve built them big now,” Ralph said. “They were only about half the size when I was here last.”

“I’ve no idea what this is all about, sir.”

“Really, Wally?”

“Not a clue, sir.”

The ambulance slowed a little, and we passed a concrete plinth on which was mounted a curious object, resembling a flattened searchlight on a cradle that could be aimed in various directions. Two men were sitting on chairs attached to either side of the moving part of the cradle. In addition to their gas masks they were wearing heavy black headphones. The men were gripping levers and steering wheels, and as we passed the cradle, it tilted and rotated, making me think of a sleepy dog suddenly waking up to follow a wasp. A third man was standing next to them holding a portable telephone to his ear.

“The name of the game’s acoustic location,” Ralph said, before looking at me expectantly. “I expect it’s all as clear as crystal now?”

“Not really, sir. But you said ‘acoustic’—I presume this has something to do with sound?”

“Very good. This is one of the main stations on the south coast. Those chaps we just passed are listening to the sky; that thing they’re sitting on can pick up sounds from tens of miles away.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Won’t they have been deafened by us driving past?”

“No more than you’d be blinded by the sun if you were looking in the opposite direction. The receiver only amplifies the sounds coming into it along the direction it’s pointed—nothing else matters. Those chaps steer it around until they pick up the drone of an incoming airplane, and then they nod it back and forth and side to side until they know they’ve got the strongest possible signal. Then a third chap reads off the elevation and directional angle and telephones that information straight to the coastal defense coordinator, who can then telephone instructions to the big guns or the Flying Corps.”

“When we were told to point our guns, sir, I always assumed it was down to spotters.”

“Which was undoubtedly what they wanted you think. Not that the Huns didn’t have their own stations, but we always reckoned our coordinating system was superior. On a clear day, when the airplanes are within visual range, a spotter will always do a better job than the sound men—it’s all a question of wavelengths and the problem of building sound mirrors much bigger than the ones we already have. But when it’s dark, or the weather’s closed in like this, and the aircraft are a long way out, the fix provided by the sound stations gives us several minutes of advance warning.”

The second concrete shape was now to our right. I noticed that the rim of the dish was missing a big chunk and some concrete rubble was lying on the ground under it—it was as if someone had taken a nibble from a biscuit. A man with white gloves and a gas mask was standing by the hut directing us to continue driving.

“Looks like they took a direct hit,” I said. “What do you suppose it was?”

Ralph steered for the third shape. “Flying wing or long-range shells. Doesn’t make much difference now—the one’s as bad as the other.”

“Are the concrete things the same as the one the men were steering?”

“Same general idea, just scaled up. The men call them sound mirrors, which is what they are, really—giant mirrors for collecting all that sound and concentrating it on a tiny spot just in front of the dish.”

“I don’t see how you can steer one of those, sir, let alone nod it back and forth.”

“You can’t, obviously. But you can move the pickup tube a little, which has a similar effect. The three of them are pointed in slightly different directions, to cover likely angles of approach. On a good day they’ll pick up the bombers when they’re still grouping over France.”

I couldn’t see any shapes beyond the third one, so I assumed this was the limit of the Dungeness station. Beyond was a colorless tract of marshy scrub, as far as the mist would allow me to see. The final shape was even more badly damaged than the second one, with two chunks missing from it. A big piece of concrete had even fallen onto the roof of the hut, though the structure appeared undamaged. A guard with a gas mask box around his neck was ushering us to park alongside the hut, gesticulating with some urgency. He had a beetroot-red face and pockmarked cheeks, and he looked thoroughly fed up with his lot.

Ralph brought the ambulance to a halt, and the engine muttered itself into silence. Even through the airtight windows I could hear the slow rise and wail of a siren. The sirens went on for so long and so often that the only thing you could do in the end was pretend not to hear them. If you didn’t, you’d go witless with worry.

We got out of the ambulance, collected our gas mask boxes from under the seats, and took two rolled-up stretchers from the rear compartment, carrying one apiece. We didn’t know how many injured we would have to deal with, but it always paid to assume the worst—if we had to come back for more stretchers, we would.

“In there,” the beetroot-faced guard said, before stalking off in the general direction of the second shape. “Be quick about it—after a shelling like this the flying wings usually come in.”

“How many injured?” Ralph called after him, but the man was already fixing his mask into place and appeared not to hear him. A seagull flew overhead and seemed to laugh at us.

“He’s having an off day,” I said, as we walked over to the hut.

“Your nerves wouldn’t be in fine fettle after spending long out here. The Huns have been bombing these listening stations to smithereens for years. Of course, we build ’em up again as soon as they’re done—the thing about concrete is it’s cheap and quick—but for some odd reason that only encourages them to keep coming back.”

“Pardon my asking, but how do you know all about this stuff, sir? Isn’t it top secret?”

“It was, although it won’t be for much longer. I don’t doubt you’ve noticed those wireless towers that are springing up everywhere?”

“Yes?” I answered cautiously, for I had seen the spindly constructions with my own eyes.

“Rumor mill says they’re something that’ll put these listening posts out of business in pretty sharp fashion. Pick up planes from hundreds of miles away, not tens. But until they’ve got ’em strung across the south coast and wired together properly, these acoustic locators are all we’ve got.” Ralph put his hand on the door to the hut. “To answer your first question . . . well, let’s attend to the chaps in here first, shall we?”

The door to the hut was stiff with rubberized gas seals, but after a good tug it swung open easily enough. I followed him inside, not quite sure what to expect. Despite the seals, the hut was damp and cold, like a slimy old cave by the sea. Although there were no windows, there was an electric light in the ceiling, a bulb trapped behind a black metal cage, with a red one next to it that wasn’t on. The lit bulb gave off a squalid brown glow that it was going to take my good eye a few moments to adjust to. There was some furniture inside: a gray metal desk with a black bakelite telephone, some chairs, some shelves with boxes and technical books, and a lot of secret-looking radio equipment, most of which was also black and bakelite. And a man sitting in one of the chairs at an angle to the desk, with a bandage around his head and another around his forearm, his shirt sleeve rolled up. As we came in, he tugged headphones from his head and put them down on the desk. He also closed a big green log book he had open on the desk, sliding it to the back. I’d only had a glimpse, but I’d seen loose papers stuffed into the log book, with lots of scratchy lines and blotches on them. I noticed there was a fountain pen on the desk next to an inkstand.

The man was a good bit older than me, although I’d still have said he was ten years younger than Ralph—fiftyish, give or take. He still had a moustache even though they weren’t in fashion nowadays. He looked at us groggily, as though he’d been half asleep until that moment, and waved us away in a good-natured kind of way. “I’m all right, lads—just a few scratches, that’s all. I told ’em it wasn’t worth sending out for an ambulance.”

“We’ll be the judges of that, won’t we, Wally?” Ralph said to me, as if we’d been working together for years.

I closed the door behind us.

The man stiffened in his chair and peered at the door with squinty eyes. “Ralph? Good lord, it can’t be, can it?”

“George?”

“One and the same, old boy!”

Ralph shook his head in delighted astonishment. “Of all the places!”

A smile spread across the other man’s face. “I presume you found out I was working here?”

“Not at all!”

The man laughed. “But it was you that put the word in for me!”

He had quite a posh way of speaking, like Ralph, but there was a bit of Yorkshire in there as well.

I placed my stretcher against the wall, coming to the conclusion I wouldn’t be needing it, even though the man would still need to come back to Cranbrook.

“Well, yes,” Ralph said. “But that was a while ago, wasn’t it? You’ll have to make allowances for me, I’m afraid—getting a bit doddery in my old age.” He put down his own stretcher and shook his head again, as if he still couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Slowly he moved to examine the seated man. “Well, what happened? Did you get knocked down in here?”