Striking the Balance (49 page)

“Will you write us a safe-conduct?” Ken Embry asked him.

“Yes, certainly,” the partisan brigadier said at once. “You should get one from Schindler, too.” His face twisted. “You are Englishmen, after all, and so deserve fair treatment under the laws of war. If you were Russians—” He shook his head. “The other thing you need to remember is how little good a safe-conduct, ours or Schindler’s, may do for you. If someone shoots at you from five hundred meters, you will not be able to present it to him.”

Though that was true, it was not a topic on which Bagnall cared to dwell. Aleksandr German found a scrap of paper, dipped a pen into a bottle that smelled more of berry juice than of ink, and scribbled rapidly. He handed the document to Bagnall, who still read Cyrillic script only haltingly. Bagnall passed it to Jerome Jones. Jones skimmed through it and nodded.

“Good luck,” Aleksandr German said. “I wish I had something more than that to offer you, but even it is in short supply here these days.”

The three Englishmen were somber when they left the partisan brigadier. “Do you think we ought to get a
laissez-passer
from Schindler?” Embry asked.

“My guess is that we needn’t bother,” Bagnall answered. “The Germans around here are all soldiers, and all know who we are. That isn’t true of the Russians, not by a long chalk. Our piece of paper may keep some peasants from slitting our throats one night while we’re asleep in their haystack”

“Or, of course, it may not,” Embry said, not wanting his reputation for cynicism to suffer. “Still, I suppose we’re better off with it.”

“Pity we didn’t bring all our food and ammunition along,” Bagnall said. “We could have started off straightaway instead of having to go back to the house.”

“It’s not that far back,” Jones said. “And after we recover the gear, I suggest we stay not upon the honor of our going. When both sides tell you you’d better hop it, you’re a fool if you don’t listen. And, except where the fair Tatiana is concerned”—he grinned ruefully—“Mrs. Jones raised no fools.”

“You’ll be free of her at last,” Bagnall reminded him.

“So will I,” he said, and then, “dammit.”

A captain with a set of decorations as impressive as Basil Roundbush’s rapped on the door frame of David Goldfarb’s laboratory at Dover College. “Hullo,” he said. “I have a present for you chaps.” He turned and let out some grunts and hisses that sounded rather as if he were doing his best to choke to death. More funny noises came back at him. Then a Lizard walked into the room, its turreted eyes going every which way.

Goldfarb’s first reaction was to grab for a pistol. Unfortunately, he wasn’t wearing one. Roundbush was, and had it out with commendable speed. “No need for that,” the much-decorated captain said. “Mzepps is quite tame, and so am I: Donald Mather, at your service.”

After his first instant of surprise, Basil Roundbush had taken a good look at Mather’s uniform. The pistol went back into its holster. “He’s SAS, David,” he said. “I expect he can protect us from a Lizard or two . . .  dozen.” He sounded more serious than he normally would have while making such a crack.

Goldfarb took a second look at Mather and concluded Roundbush
was
serious. The captain was a handsome chap in a blond, chisel-featured way, and seemed affable enough, but something about his eyes warned that getting on his wrong side would be a mistake—quite likely a fatal mistake. And he hadn’t won those medals for keeping the barracks clean and tidy, either.

“Sir, what will we do with—Mzepps, did you say?” he asked.

“Mzepps, yes,” Mather answered, pronouncing each
p
separately. “I expect he might be useful to you: he’s a radar technician, you see. I’ll stay around to interpret till the two of you understand each other well enough, then I’ll be on my merry way. He does speak a little English now, but he’s far from fluent.”

“A radar technician?” Basil Roundbush said softly. “Oh, David, you are a lucky sod. You know that, don’t you? That peach of a girl, now a Lizard of your very own to play with.” He rounded on Mather. “You don’t happen to have a jet-engine specialist concealed anywhere about your person, do you? We have this lovely video platter here on how to service their bloody engines, and knowing what the words mean would help us understand the pictures.”

Captain Mather actually did look up his sleeve. “Nothing here, I’m afraid.” The dispassionate tone of the reply only made it more absurd. Mzepps spoke up in the Lizards’ hissing language. Mather listened to him, then said, “He tells me he was kept with a couple of jet-engine men, er, Lizards, back in—well, you don’t need to know that. Where he was before. They like it where they are, he says. Why was that, Mzepps?” He repeated the question in the Lizards’ speech, listened to the answer, laughed, and reported back: “They like it because the bloke they’re working with is hardly bigger than they are . . .  Hullo! What’s got into you two?”

Goldfarb and Roundbush had both let out yelps of delight. Goldfarb explained: “That has to be Group Captain Hipple. We both thought he’d bought his plot when the Lizards jumped on Bruntingthorpe with both feet. First word we’ve had he’s alive.”

“Ah. That is a good show,” Mather said. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Goldfarb. “Something I was supposed to tell you, and I nearly forgot.” He looked angry at himself: he wasn’t supposed to forget things. “You’re cousin to that Russie chap, aren’t you?” Without waiting for Goldfarb’s startled nod, he went on, “Yes, of course you are. I ought to let you know that, not so very long ago, I put him and his family on a boat bound for Palestine, on orders of my superiors.”

“Did you?” Goldfarb said tonelessly. “Thank you for telling me, sir. Other than that—” He shook his head. “I got them out of Poland so the Lizards wouldn’t do their worst to him, and now he’s back in another country they’ve overrun. Have you heard any word of him since he got there?”

“I’m afraid not,” Mather answered. “I’ve not even heard
that
he got there. You know how security is.” He seemed faintly embarrassed. “I daresay I shouldn’t have told you what I just did, but blood’s thicker than water, what?”

“Yes.” Goldfarb gnawed on his lower lip. “Better to know, I suppose.” He wasn’t sure he meant what he said. He felt helpless. But then, Mather might as easily have brought news that Moishe and Rivka and Reuven had been killed in a Lizard air raid on London. There was still hope. Clinging to it, he said, “Well, we haven’t much choice but to get on with it, have we?”

“Right you are,” Mather said, and Goldfarb gathered he’d made a favorable impression. The SAS man went on, “Only way to keep from going mad is to carry on.”

How very British,
Goldfarb thought, half ruefully, half in admiration. “Let’s find out what Mzepps knows about radars, and what he can tell us about the sets we’ve captured from his chums.”

Before that first day’s work with the Lizard prisoner was done, he learned as much in some areas as he had in months of patient—and sometimes not so patient—trial and error. Mzepps gave him the key to the color-coding system the Lizards used for their wires and electrical components: far more elaborate and more informative than the one with which Goldfarb had grown up. The Lizard also proved a deft technician, showing the RAF radarman a dozen quick tricks, maybe more, that made assembling, disassembling, and troubleshooting radars easier.

But when it came to actually repairing the sets, he was less help. Through Mather, Goldfarb asked him, “What do you do when this unit goes bad?” He pointed to the gadgetry that controlled the radar wavelength. He didn’t know how it did that, but more cut and try had convinced him it did.

Mzepps said, “You remove the module and replace it with one in good working order.” He reached into the radar. “See, it snaps in and out like this. Very easy.”

It was very easy. From an accessibility standpoint, the Lizards’ sets beat what the RAF made all hollow. The Lizards designed them so they not only worked but were also convenient to service. A lot of good engineering had gone into that. British engineers had just got to the point of being able to design radars that worked. Every time he looked at the cat’s cradle of wires and resistors and capacitors and the rest of the electronics that made up the guts of an RAF set, Goldfarb was reminded that they hadn’t yet concerned themselves with convenience.

But Mzepps hadn’t quite grasped what he’d meant. “I see how you replace it, yes. But suppose you haven’t got a replacement for the whole unit. Suppose you want to repair the part in it that’s gone bad? How do you diagnose which part that is, and how do you fix it?”

Captain Mather put the revised question to the Lizard. “No can do,” Mzepps said in English. He went on in his own language. Mather had to stop and ask more questions a couple of times. At last he gave Goldfarb the gist: “He says it really can’t be done, old man. That’s a unitary assembly. If one part of it goes, the whole unit’s buggered for fair.” Mzepps added something else. Mather translated again: “The idea is that it shouldn’t break down to start with.”

“If he can’t fix it when it breaks, what the devil good is he?” Goldfarb said. As far as he was concerned, you had no business mucking about with electronics without some notion of the theory behind the way the machines worked—and if you understood the theory, you were halfway to being able to jury-rig a fix when something went wrong. And something would go wrong.

After a moment, he realized he wasn’t quite fair. Plenty of people ran motorcars without knowing more about how they worked than where to put in the petrol and how to patch a punctured inner tube. Still, he wouldn’t have wanted one of those people on his team if he were driving a race car.

Mzepps might have been thinking along with him. Through Captain Mather, the Lizard said, “The task of a technician is to know which unit is ailing. We cannot manufacture components for our sets on this planet, anyhow. Your technology is too primitive. We have to use what we brought with us.”

Goldfarb imagined a Victorian expeditionary force stranded in darkest Africa. The British soldiers could cut a great swath through the natives—as long as their ammunition held out, their Maxim guns didn’t break some highly machined part, their horses didn’t start dying of sleeping sickness, and they didn’t come down with malaria or yaws or whatever you came down with in darkest Africa (sure as hell, you’d come down with something). If that Victorian army was stuck there, without hope of rescue . . . 

He turned to Donald Mather. “Do you know, sir, this is the first bit of sympathy I’ve ever felt for the Lizards.”

“Don’t waste it,” Mather advised him. “They’d waste precious little on you, and that’s the God’s truth. They’re a nasty set of foes, which only means we shall have to be nasty in return. Gas, these bombs . . .  If we’re not to go under, we must seize what spares we can.”

That was inarguably true. Even so, Goldfarb didn’t think Mather took his point. He glanced over at the SAS man. No, Mather didn’t look to be the sort who’d appreciate argument by historical analogy or any such
pilpul—
not that he’d know that word, either.

“Ask Mzepps what he’ll do when he and his scaly chums run out of spares,” Goldfarb said.

“By then, we’ll be beaten,” Mather said after the Lizard was done with his noises. “That’s still their propaganda line, in spite of the thrashing they took when they came over here.”

“Can’t expect them to go about saying they’re doomed, I suppose,” Goldfarb allowed. “But if our charming prisoner there still thinks we’re going to be trounced, why is he being so cooperative here? He’s helping grease the skids for his own people. Why not just name, rank, and pay number?”

“There’s an interesting question.” Mather made steam-engine noises at Mzepps. Goldfarb doubted he came up with many interesting questions on his own, not ones unrelated to the immediate task at hand. The Lizard prisoner replied at some length, and with some heat. Mather gave Goldfarb the essence of it: “He says we are his captors, so we have become his superiors. The Lizards obey their superiors the way Papists obey the Pope, only rather more so.”

Goldfarb didn’t know how well, or even if, Catholics obeyed the Pope. He didn’t point out his ignorance to Mather. The SAS man was liable to have other aversions, including one to Jews. If he did, he didn’t let it interfere with the way he did his job. Goldfarb was willing to settle for that. The world being as it was these days, it was more than you could count on getting.

“What sort of treatment does he get?” he asked Mather, pointing to Mzepps. “After he’s done here, where does he go? How does he spend his time?”

“We’ve brought several Lizards into Dover to work with you boffins,” Mather replied. That in itself surprised Goldfarb, who was used to thinking of people like Fred Hipple as boffins, not to having the label applied to himself. He supposed that, to a combat soldier like Mather, anyone who fought the war with slide rule and soldering iron rather than Sten gun and hand grenade counted as an intellectual sort. His bemusement made him miss part of the SAS man’s next sentence: “—billeted them at a cinema house that was worthless otherwise with so little electricity in town. They get the same rations our troops do, but—”

“Poor devils,” Goldfarb said with deep feeling. “Isn’t that against the Geneva Convention? Being purposely cruel to prisoners, I mean.”

Mather chuckled. “I shouldn’t wonder. I was going to say, they get more meat and fish than we do, which isn’t hard, I know. Signs are, they need it in their diet.”

“So do I,” Basil Roundbush said plaintively from across the room. “Oh, so do I. Can’t you see me pining away for want of sirloin?” He let out a theatrical groan.

Captain Mather rolled his eyes and tried to carry on: “The ones who want it, we give ginger. Mzepps hasn’t got that habit. They talk among themselves. Some of them have taken up cards and dice and even chess.”

“Those can’t be games anything like what they’re used to,” Goldfarb said.

“They have dice, Mzepps tell me. The others, I suppose, help fill up the time. We don’t let them have any of their own amusements. Can’t. Most of those are electric—no, you’d say electronic, what?—devices of one sort or another, and who knows but what they might build some sort of wireless from them.”