Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

Group Captain Hipple brought the news back from the administrative section’s Nissen hut. It produced a brief, startled silence from his subordinates, who were laboring mightily to pull secrets from the wreckage of the Lizard fighter-bomber that had been brought down not far from the aerodrome.

Typically, Flight Officer Basil Roundbush was first to break that silence: “Generous of him to give us notice enough to make sure our flies are closed.”

“I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be confident yours is, dear boy,” Hipple returned. Roundbush covered his face with his hands, acknowledging the hit. The group captain might have been shorter than his subordinates, but gave away nothing in wit. He continued, “I gather no one knew until moments ago: quite a lot of security laid on, for reasons which should be plain enough.”

“Wouldn’t do for the Lizards to pay us a visit just now, would it, sir?” Goldfarb said.

“Yes, that would prove-embarrassing,” Hipple said, an understatement Roundbush might have coveted.

And so, just as Goldfarb had, the Prime Minister came down from Leicester by bicycle, pedaling along on an elderly model like a grandfather out for a constitutional. He dismounted outside the meteorology hut, where Hipple and his team still labored after the latest Lizard bombing raid. When Goldfarb saw the round pink face and the familiar cigar through the window, he gulped. He’d never expected to meet the leader of the British Empire.

Wing Commander Julian Peary’s reaction was more prosaic. In the big deep voice that went so oddly with his slight physique, he said, “I do hope he’s not damaged any of the beets.”

It was only half a joke. Like everyone else at Bruntingthorpe-like everyone else in Britain, or so it seemed-Hipple’s team cultivated a garden. The British Isles held more people than they could easily feed, and shipments from America were down, not so much because the Lizards bombed them (they still took much less notice of ships than of air or rail or road transport) as because the Yanks, beset at home, had little to spare.

So, gardens. Beets, potatoes, peas, beans, turnips, parsnips, cabbages, maize… whatever the climate would permit, people grew-and sometimes guarded with cricket bats, savage dogs, or shotguns against two-legged thieves too big to be frightened by scarecrows.

Everyone did come to attention when the Prime Minister, accompanied by a bodyguard who looked as if he never smiled, walked into the Nissen hut. “As you were, gentlemen, please,” Churchill said. “After all, officially I am not here, but speaking over the BBC in London. Because I am in the habit of speaking live, I can occasionally use the subterfuge of sound recordings to let myself be in two places at once.” He let out a conspiratorial chuckle. “I hope you won’t give me away.”

Automatically, Goldfarb shook his head. Hearing Churchill’s voice without the static and distortion of a wireless set was to him even more intimate than seeing the Prime Minister in the tubby flesh rather than through photographs: pictures captured his image more accurately than the airwaves did his voice.

Churchill strode over to Fred Hipple, who was standing beside a wooden table on which lay pieces of the turbine from the crashed Lizard fighter’s jet engine. Pointing to them, the Prime Minister asked, “How long before we shall be able to duplicate that engine, Group Captain?”

“Duplicate it, sir?” Hipple said, “It won’t be soon; the Lizards are far ahead of us in control mechanisms for the engine, in machining techniques, and in the materials they employ: they do things with titanium and ceramics we’ve never dreamt of, much less attempted. But in determining how and why they make things as they do, we learn how to do better ourselves.”

“I see,” Churchill’ said thoughtfully. “So even though you have the book in front of you”-he pointed to the Disassembled chunks of turbine again-“you cannot simply read off what is on its pages, but must decode it as if it were written in a cipher.”

“That’s a good analogy, sir,” Hipple said. “The facts of the engine are relatively straightforward, even if we can’t yet produce one identical to it ourselves. When it comes to the radar from the same downed aircraft, I fear we are still missing a great many code groups, so to speak.”

“So I have been given to understand,” Churchill said, “although I do not fully grasp where the difficulty lies.”

“Let me take you over to Radarman Goldfarb, then, sir,” Hipple said. “He joined the team to help emplace a radar set in production Meteors, and has labored valiantly to unlock the secrets of the Lizard unit that fell into our hands.”

As the group captain brought the Prime Minister over to his workbench, Goldfarb thought, not for the first time, that Fred Hipple was a good man to work for. A lot of superior officers would have done all the explaining to the brass themselves, and pretended their subordinates didn’t exist. But Hipple introduced Goldfarb to Churchill, then stood back and let him speak for himself.

He didn’t find it easy at first. When he stammered, the Prime Minister shifted the subject away from radar: “Goldfarb,” he said musingly. “Was I not told you are the lad with a family connection to Mr. Russie, the former Lizard spokesman from Poland?”

“Yes, that’s true, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “We’re cousins. When my father came to England before the Great War, he urged his sister and her husband to come with him, and he kept urging them to get out until the second war started in ‘39. They wouldn’t listen to him, though. Moishe Russie is their son.”

“So your family kept up the connection, then?”

“Till the war cut us off, yes, sir. After that, I didn’t know what had happened to any of my relatives until Moishe began speaking on the wireless.” He didn’t tell Churchill most of his kinsfolk had died in the ghetto; the Prime Minister presumably knew that already. Besides, Goldfarb couldn’t think about their fate without filling up with a terrible anger that made him wish England were still at war with the Nazis rather than the Lizards.

Churchill said, “I shan’t forget this link. It may yet prove useful for us.” Before Goldfarb could work up the nerve to ask him how, he swung back to radar: “Suppose you explain to me how and why this set is so different from ours, and so baffling.”

“I’ll try, sir,” Goldfarb said. “One of our radars, like a wireless set, depends on valves-vacuum tubes, the Americans would say-for its operation. The Lizards don’t use valves. Instead, they have these things.” He’ pointed to the boards with little lumps and silvery spiderwebs of metal set across them.

“And so?” Churchill said. “Why should a mere substitution pose a problem?”

“Because we don’t know how the bloody things work,” Goldfarb blurted. Wishing the ground would open up and swallow him, he tried to make amends: “That is, we have no theory to explain how these little lumps of silicon-which is what they are, sir-can perform the function of valves. And, because they’re nothing like what we’re used to, we’re having to find out what each one does by cut and try, so to speak: we run power into it and see what happens. We don’t know how much power to use, either.”

Churchill fortunately took his strong language in stride. “And what have you learnt from your experiments?”

“That the Lizards know more about radar than we do, sir,” Goldfarb answered. “That’s the long and short of it, I’m afraid. We can’t begin to make parts to match these: a chemical engineer with whom I’ve spoken says our best silicon isn’t pure enough. And some of the little lumps, when you look at them under a microscope, are so finely etched that we can’t imagine how, let alone why, it’s been done.”