Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

“How and why are for those with the luxury of time, which we have not got,” Churchill said. “We need to know what the device does, whether we can match it, and how to make it less useful to the foe.”

“Yes, sir,” Goldfarb said admiringly. Churchill was no boffin, but he had a firm grip on priorities. No one yet fully understood the theory of the magnetron, or how and why the narrow channels connecting its eight outer holes to the larger central one exponentially boosted the strength of the signal. That the device operated so, however, was undeniable fact, and had given the RAF a great lead over German radar-although not, worse luck, over what the Lizards used.

Group Captain Hipple said, “What have we learnt which is exploitable, Goldfarb?”

“Sorry, sir; I should have realized at once that was what the Prime Minister needed to know. We can copy the design of the Lizards’ magnetron; that, at least, we recognize. It gives a signal of shorter wavelength and hence more precise direction than any we’ve made ourselves. And the nose dish that receives returning pulses is a very fine bit of engineering which shouldn’t be impossible to incorporate into later marks of the Meteor.”

“Very good, Radarman Goldfarb,” Churchill said. “I shan’t keep you from your work any longer. With the aid of men like you and your comrades in this hut, we shall triumph over this adversity as we have over all others. And you, Radarman, you may yet have a role to play even more important than your work here.”

The Prime Minister looked uncommonly cherubic. Three years in the RAF had taught Goldfarb that rankers who wore that expression had more up their sleeves than their arms. They’d also taught him he couldn’t do anything about it, so he said what he had to say: “I’ll be happy to serve in any way I can, sir.”

Churchill nodded genially, then went back to Hipple and his colleagues for more talk about jet engines. After another few minutes, he put his hat back on, tipped it to Hipple, and left the Nissen hut.

Basil Roundbush grinned at Goldfarb. “I say, old man, after Winnie makes you an MP, do remember the little people who knew you before you grew rich and famous.”

“An MP?” Goldfarb shook his head in mock dismay. “Lord, I hope that’s not what he had in mind. He said he had something important instead of this.”

That sally met with general approval. One of the meteorologists said, “Good job you didn’t tell him you’re a Labour supporter, Goldfarb.”

“It doesn’t matter, not now.” Goldfarb had backed Labour, yes, as offering more to the working man than the Tories could (and, as was true of a lot of Jewish immigrants and their progeny, his own politics had a slant to the left). But he also knew no one but Churchill could have rallied Britain against Hitler, and no one else could have kept her in the fight against the Lizards.

Thinking of the Nazis and the Lizards together made Goldfarb think of the invasion so many had feared in 1940. The Germans hadn’t been able to bring it off, not least because radar kept them from driving the RAF from the skies. If the Lizards came, no one could offer any such guarantee of success. Ironically, the Germans holding northern France served as England’s shield against invasion by the aliens.

But the shield was not perfect. The Lizards had control of the air when they chose to use it. They could leapfrog over northern France and the Channel both. Just because, they hadn’t done it didn’t mean they wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Goldfarb snorted. The only thing he could do about that was try to make British radar more effective, which would in turn make the Lizards pay more if they decided to invade. It wasn’t as much as he’d have wanted to do in an ideal world, but it was more than most people could say, so be supposed it would do.

And he’d not only met Winston Churchill, but talked business with him! That wasn’t something everyone could say. He couldn’t write home to his family that the Prime Minister had been here-the censors would never pass it-but he could tell them if he ever got down to London. He’d almost given up on the notion of leave.

Fred Hipple said, “Churchill’s full of good ideas. The only difficulty is, he’s also full of bad ones, and sometimes telling the one from the other’s not easy till after the fact.”

“What he said about tackling the Lizards’ radar circuitry was first-rate,” Goldfarb said. “ What is more important for us now than how or why ; we can use what we learn without knowing why it works, just as some stupid clot can drive a motorcar without cluttering his head with the theory of internal combustion.”

“Ah, but someone must understand the theory, or your stupid clot would have no motorcar to drive,” Basil Roundbush said.

“That’s true only to a limited degree,” Hipple said. “Even now, theory takes you only so far in aircraft design; eventually, you just have to go out and see how the beast flies. That was much more the case during the Great War, when practically everything, from what the older engineers have told me, was cut and try. Yet the aircraft they manufactured did fly.”

“Most of the time,” Roundbush said darkly. “I’m bloody glad I never had to go up in them.”

Goldfarb ignored that. Roundbush made wisecracks the same way other men fiddled with rosaries or cracked their knuckles or tugged at one particular lock of hair: it was a nervous tic, nothing more.

Clucking softly to himself, Goldfarb fixed a power source to one side of a Lizard circuit element and an ohmmeter to the other. He’d measure voltage and amperage next: with these strange components, you couldn’t tell what they were supposed to do to a current that ran through them except by experiment.

He turned on the power. The ohmmeter swung; the component did resist the current’s flow. Goldfarb grunted in satisfaction: He’d thought it would: it looked like others that had. He noted down the reading, as well as where the circuit element sat on its board and what it looked like. Then he turned off the power and hooked up the voltage meter. One tiny piece at a time, he added to the jigsaw puzzle.

As Vyacheslav Molotov turned the knob that led him into the antechamber in front of Stalin’s night office, he felt and suppressed a familiar nervousness. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, his word went unchallenged. In negotiating with the capitalist states that hated the Soviet revolution, even in discussions with the Lizards, he was the unyielding representative of his nation. He knew he had a reputation for being inflexible, and did everything he could to play it up.

Not here, though. Anyone who was unyielding and inflexible with Stalin would soon know the stiffness of death. Then Molotov had no more time for such reflections, for Stalin’s orderly-oh, the fellow had a fancy title, but that was what he was-nodded to him and said, “Go on in. He expects you, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich.”

Molotov nodded and entered Stalin’s sanctum. This was not where the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was photographed with diplomats or soldiers. He had a fancy office upstairs for that. He worked here, at hours that suited him. It was one-thirty in the morning. Stalin would be at it for at least another couple of hours. Those who dealt with him had to adjust themselves accordingly.

Stalin looked up from the desk with the gooseneck lamp. “Good morning, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich,” he said with his throaty Georgian accent. His voice held no irony; morning it was, as far as he was concerned.

“Good morning, Iosef Vissarionovich,” Molotov replied. Whatever his feelings about the matter were, he had schooled himself not to reveal them. He found that important at any time, doubly so around the ruler of the Soviet Union.