Harry Turtledove - Striking the Balance

“Even thinking he was in Lodz put us on alert,” Bertha said. “Who knows what he might have done if he’d got here without our knowing it?”

“He turned a corner,” Anielewicz said, running it through his mind again like a piece of film from the cinema. “He turned a corner, and then another one, very quickly. The second time, I had to guess which way he’d gone, and I guessed wrong.”

“Don’t keep beating yourself over the head with it, Mordechai,” Bertha said. “It can’t be helped now, and you did everything you could.”

“That’s so,” Gruver rumbled. “No doubt about it”

Anielewicz hardly heard him. He was looking at Bertha Fleishman. She’d never called him by his first name before, not that he remembered. He would have remembered, too; he was certain of that.

She was looking at him, too. She flushed a little when their eyes met, but she didn’t look away. He’d known she liked him well enough. He liked her well enough, too. Except when she smiled, she was plain and mousy. He’d been to bed with women far prettier. He suddenly seemed to hear Solomon Gruver’s deep voice again, going, So what? Gruver-that-wasn’t had a point. He’d bedded those women and enjoyed himself doing it, but he hadn’t for an instant thought of spending his life with any of them. Bertha, though…

“If we live through this-” he said. The five words made a complete sentence. If you knew how to listen to them.

Bertha Fleishman did. “Yes. If we do,” she replied: a complete answer.

The real Solomon Gruver seemed less attentive to what was going on around him than the imaginary one inside Anielewicz’s head. “If we live through this,” he said, “we’re going to have to do something better with that thing we have than leaving it where it is. But if we move it now, we just draw attention to it, and that lets this Skorzeny mamzer have his chance.”

“That’s all true, Solomon-every word of it,” Mordechai agreed solemnly. Then he started to laugh. A moment later, so did Bertha.

“And what is so funny?” Gruver demanded with ponderous dignity. “Did I make a joke and, God forbid, not know it?”

“God forbid,” Anielewicz said, and laughed harder.

As George Bagnall and Ken Embry walked to Dover College, jet engines roared overhead. Bagnall’s automatic reaction was to find the nearest hole in the ground and jump into it. With an effort, he checked himself and looked upward. For once, the thinking, rational part of his brain had got it right: those were Meteors up there, not Lizard fighter-bombers.

“Bloody hell!” Embry burst out; conditioned reflex must nearly have got the better of him, too. “We’ve only been gone a year and a half, but it feels as though we’ve stepped back into 1994, not 1944.”

“Doesn’t it just,” Bagnall agreed. “They were flying those things when we left, but not many of them. You don’t see Hurricanes at all any more, and they’re phasing out Spitfires fast as they can. It’s a brave new world, and no mistake.”

“Still a place for bomber crew-for the next twenty minutes, anyhow,” Embry said. “They haven’t put jets on Lancs, not yet they haven’t. But everything else they have done-” He shook his head. “No wonder they sent us back to school. We’re almost as obsolete as if we’d been flying Sopwith Camels. Trouble is, of course, we haven’t been flying anything.”

“It’s even worse for Jones,” Bagnall said. “We’re still flying the same buses, even if they have changed the rest of the rules. His radars are starting to come from a different world: literally.”

“Same with our bomb-aiming techniques,” Embry said as they climbed the poured-concrete steps and strode down the corridor toward their classroom.

The lecturer there, a flight lieutenant named Constantine Jordan, was already scribbling on the blackboard, though it still lacked a couple of minutes of the hour. Bagnall looked around as he took his seat. Most of his classmates had a pale, pasty look to them; some were in obvious if stifled pain. That made sense-besides the rarities like Bagnall and Embry, the people who’d been out of service long enough to require refresher courses were the ones who’d been badly wounded. A couple had dreadful scars on their faces; what lay under their uniforms was anyone’s guess, though not one Bagnall cared to make.

An instant before the clock in the bell tower chimed eleven, Flight Lieutenant Jordan turned and began: “As I noted at the end of yesterday’s session, what the Lizards call skelkwank bids fair to revolutionize bomb aiming. Skelkwank light, unlike the ordinary sort”-he pointed up to the electric lamps-“is completely organized, you might say. It’s all of the same frequency, the same amplitude, the same phase. The Lizards have several ways of creating such light. We’re busy working on them to see which ones we can most readily make for ourselves. But that’s largely beside the point. We’ve captured enough generators of skelkwank light to have equipped a good many bombers with them, and that’s why you’re here.”

Bagnall’s pencil scurried across the notebook. Every so often, he’d pause to shake his hand back and forth to wring out writer’s cramp. All this was new to him, and all vital-now he was able to understand the term he’d first met in Pskov. Amazing, all the things you could do with skelkwank light.

Jordan went on, “What we do is, we illuminate the target with a skelkwank lamp. A sensor head properly attuned to it manipulates the fins on the bomb and guides it to the target. So long as the light stays on the target, the guidance will work. We’ve all seen it used against us more often than we’d fancy. Again, we’re operating with captured sensor heads, which are in limited supply, but we’re also exploring ways and means to manufacture them. Yes, Mr. McBride? You have a question?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the flying officer who’d raised his hand. “These new munitions are all very well, sir, but if we’re flying against the Lizards, how do we approach the target closely enough to have some hope of destroying it? Their weapons can strike us at much greater range than that at which we can respond. Believe me, sir, I know that.” He was one of the men who had scar tissue slagging half his face.

“It is a difficulty,” Jordan admitted. “We are also seeking to copy the guided rockets with which the Lizards have shot down so many of our aircraft, but that’s proving slower work, even with the assistance of Lizard prisoners.”

“We’d best not fight another war with them any time soon, is all I can say,” McBride answered, “or we’ll come out of it with no pilots left at all. Without rockets to match theirs, we’re hors d’oeuvres, nothing better.”

Bagnall had never thought of himself as a canape, but the description fit all too well. He wished he could have gone up against the Luftwaffe with a Lancaster armed with skelkwank bombs and rockets to swat down the Messerschmitts before they bored in for the kill. After a moment, he realized he might fly with those weapons against the Germans one day. But if he did, the Germans were liable to have them, too.

Flight Lieutenant Jordan kept lecturing for several minutes after the noon bells rang. Again, that was habit. At last, he dismissed his pupils with the warning, “Tomorrow you’ll be quizzed on what we’ve covered this past week. Those with poor marks will be turned into toads and sent hopping after blackbeetles. Amazing what technology can do these days, is it not? See you after lunch.”

When Bagnall and Embry went out into the corridor to head to the cafeteria for an uninspiring but free meal, Jerome Jones called to them, “Care to dine with my chum here?”