Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

“You can say that again.” Jerome Jones rubbed his weary eyes. “It was a bit dicey there for a while, wasn’t it?”

“Just a bit, yes.” Goldfarb leaned back in his uncomfortable chair, hunched his shoulders. Something in his neck went snap . He grunted with relief, then grunted again as he thought about Jones’s reply. He’d lived surrounded by British reserve all his twenty-three years, even learned to imitate it, but it still seemed unnatural to him.

His newlywed parents had fled to London to escape Polish pogroms a little before the start of the first World War. A stiff upper lip was not part of the scanty baggage they’d brought with them; they shouted at each other, and eventually at David and his brothers and sister, sometimes angrily, more often lovingly, but always at full throttle. He’d never learned at home to hold back, which made the trick all the harder anywhere else.

The reminiscent smile he’d worn for a moment quickly faded. By the news dribbling out, pogroms rolled through Poland again, worse under the Nazis than ever under the tsars. When Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia, Saul Goldfarb had written to his own brothers and sisters and cousins in Warsaw, urging them to get out of Poland while they could. No one left. A few months later, it was too late to leave.

A blip on the screen snapped him out of his unhappy reverie. “Blimey,” Jones breathed, King’s English cast aside in surprise, “lookit that bugger go.”

“I’m looking,” Goldfarb said. He kept on looking, too, until the target disappeared again. It didn’t take long. He sighed. “Now we’ll have to fill out a pixie report.”

“Third one this week,” Jones observed. “Bloody pixies’re getting busier, whatever he hell they are.”

“Whatever,” Goldfarb echoed. For the past several months, radars in England-and, he gathered unofficially, the United States as well-had been showing phantom aircraft flying impossibly high and even more impossibly fast; 90,000 feet and better than 2,000 miles an hour were the numbers he’d heard most often. He said, “I used to think they came from something. wrong in the circuits somewhere. I’ve seen enough now, though, that I have trouble believing it.

“What else could they be?” Jones still belonged to the circuitry-problem school. He fired off the big guns of its argument: “They aren’t ours. They don’t belong to the Yanks. And if they were Jerry’s they d be dropping things on our heads. What does that leave? Men from Mars?

“Laugh all you like” Goldfarb said stubbornly. “If there’s something wrong in the machinery’s guts, why can t the boffins find it and fix it?”

“Crikey, I don’t think even the blokes who invented this beast know what all it can and can’t do,” Jones retorted.

Since that was unquestionably true Goldfarb didn’t respond to it directly. Instead, he said, “So why has the machinery only started finding pixies now? Why didn’t they show up on the screens from the first day?”

“If the boffins can’t figure it out, how do you expect me to know?” Jones said. “Pull out a bloody pixie report form, will you? With luck, we can get it done before we spot the bombers. Then we won’t have to worry about it tomorrow.”

“Right.” Goldfarb sometimes thought that if the Germans had managed to cross the Channel and invade England, the British could have penned them behind walls of paper and then buried them in more. The pigeonholes under the console at which he sat held enough requisitions, directives, and reports to baffle the most subtle bureaucrat for years.

Nor was the pixie report, blurrily printed on coarse, shoddy paper, properly called by a name anywhere near so simple. The RAF had instead produced.a document titled INCIDENT OF APPARENT ANOMALOUS DETECTION OF HIGH-SPEED, HIGH-ALTITUDE TARGET. Lest the form fall into German hands, it nowhere mentioned that the anomalous detections ( apparent detections , Goldfarb corrected himself) took place by means of radar. As if Jerry doesn’t know we’ve got it, he thought.

He found a stub of pencil, filled in the name of the station, the date, time, and bearing and perceived velocity of the contact, then stuck the form in a manila folder taped to the side of the radar screen. The folder, stuck there by the base CO, was labeled PIXIE REPORTS. With an attitude like that, the CO would never see promotion again.

Jones grunted in satisfaction, as if he’d filled out the form himself. He said, “Off it goes to London tomorrow.”

“Yes, so they can compare it to others they’ve got and work out altitude and such from the figures,” Goldfarb said. “They wouldn’t bother with that if it were just in the circuits, now, would they?”

“Don’t ask me what they’ll do in London,” Jones said, an attitude Goldfarb also found sensible. Jones went on, “I’d be happier believing the pixies were real if anyone ever saw one anywhere but there.” He pointed at the radar screen.

“So would I,” Goldfarb admitted, “but look at the trouble we’ve had even with the Ju-86.” The wide-span reconnaissance bombers had been flying over southern England for months, usually above 40,000 feet-so high that Spitfires had enormous trouble climbing up to intercept them.

Jerome Jones remained unconvinced. “The Junkers 86 is just a Jerry crate. It’s got a good ceiling, yes, but it’s slow and easy to shoot down once we get to it. It’s not like that Superman bloke in the Yank funny books, faster than a speeding bullet.”

“I know. I’m just saying we can’t see a plane that high up even if it’s there-and if it’s going that fast, even a spotter with binoculars doesn’t have long to search before it’s gone. What we need are binoculars slaved to the radar, so one could know precisely where to look.” As he spoke, Goldfarb wondered if that was practical, and how to go about setting it up if it was.

He got so lost in his own scheme that he didn’t really notice the blip on the radar screen for a moment. Then Jones said, “Pixies again.” Sure enough, the radar was reporting more of the mysterious targets. Jones’s voice changed. “They’re acting peculiar.”

“Too right they are.” Goldfarb stared at the screen, mentally translating its picture into aircraft (he wondered if Jones, who thought of pixies as something peculiar going on inside the radar set, did the same). “They’re showing up as slower than they ever did before.”

“And there are more of them,” Jones said. “Lots more.” He turned to Goldfarb. No one looked healthy by the green glow of the cathode-ray tube, but now he’ seemed especially pale; the line of his David Niven mustache was the sole color in his thin, sharp-featured face. “David, I think-they must be real.” Goldfarb recognized what was in his voice. It was fear.

Hunger crackled like fire in Moishe Russie’s belly. He’d thought lean times and High Holy Days fasts had taught him what hunger meant, but they’d no more prepared him for the Warsaw ghetto than a picture of a lake taught a man to swim.

Long black coat flapping about him like a moving piece of the night, he scurried from one patch of deep shadow to the next. It was long past curfew, which had begun at nine. If a German saw him, he would live only so long as he still amused his tormentor. Fear dilated his nostrils at every breath, made him suck in great draughts of the fetid ghetto air.

But hunger drove harder than fear-and after all, he could become the object of a German’s sport at any hour of the day or night, for any reason or none. Only four days before, the Nazis had fallen on the Jews who came to the Leszno Street courthouse to pay their taxes-taxes the Nazis themselves imposed. They robbed the Jews not only of what they claimed was owed, but also of anything else they happened to have on their persons. With the robbery came blows and kicks, as if to remind the Jews in whose clawed grip they lay.