Harry Turtledove - In the Balance

With another groan, Russie clutched his belly and sank back down. Rivka’s alarmed expression turned to real concern. But she rallied quickly. “Please go now,” she told the man. “My husband would come if he possibly could; you know that. But he really is ill.”

“Yes, I see he is. I’m sorry. God grant you health soon, Reb Moishe.” The fellow departed at the same breakneck pace at which he’d arrived.

Rivka shut the door, then turned on Russie. “Are you all right?” she demanded, hands on hips. “You were going out there, I know you were. Then all, of a sudden-”

He knew a moment’s pride that his acting had been good enough to give her doubts. He said, “If the Lizards are already there, I can’t let them see me, or they’ll know I’m not as sick as I let on.”

Her eyes widened. “Yes, that makes sense. You-”

“I’m not done,” he interrupted. “The other thing is, I don’t think our men are tangling with the Armja Krajowa Poles by accident. Think where the quarrel is-at the opposite end of Warsaw from the Lizard headquarters. I think they’re trying to draw troops-and maybe Zolraag’s attention, too-away from the studio and the transmitter. Mordechai said tomorrow night, but he works fast. Unless I miss my guess, this is a put-up fight.”

“I hope you’re right.” For most of the next minute, Rivka looked as intensely thoughtful as a yeshiva student following a rabbi’s exegesis of a difficult Talmudic text. A smile broke through like sunrise. “Yes, I think you are.”

“Good,” Russie said. He did feel better with the warm soup inside him. He hoped he wouldn’t have to spew it up again, but carried another vial of ipecac in a coat pocket.

He got up and walked over to the battered sofa. Springs poked through here and there and the fabric was filthy, but just owning a sofa was a mark of status among Warsaw Jews these days. The Nazis hadn’t stolen it in one of their ghetto sweeps, and the family hadn’t had to break it up and burn it to keep from freezing the winter before. As he lay down on it, Russie was conscious of how lucky that made him.

Rivka draped a threadbare blanket over him. “How can you look sick if you’re not covered up?” she asked.

“I seem to have managed,” he said, but she ignored him. He let the blanket stay.

About the time he came close to dozing off, Reuven started banging on a pot with a spoon. Rivka quickly hushed the boy, but the damage was done. A few minutes later, a new, more ominous racket filled the flat: the distant rattle of guns. “Where is it coming from?” Russie asked, turning his head this way and that. If it was from the north, the Jews and Poles might really have opened up on each other; if from the south, Anielewicz’s fighters in German uniform were hitting the radio transmitter.

“I can’t tell, either,” Rivka said. “The sound is funny inside a block of flats.”

“That’s true.” Russie settled himself to wait. The shooting and explosions lasted only a couple of minutes. He’d nearly forgotten the echoing silence that followed gunfire, though he’d heard it almost daily before the Lizards seized Warsaw from the Germans.

Half an hour later, another knock came at the apartment door. Rivka opened it. Without ceremony, a Lizard walked in. He fixed both eyes on Russie. In hissing German, he said, “I am Ssfeer, from the governor Zolraag’s staff. You know me now?”

“Yes, I recognized your body paint,” Moishe answered. “How can I help you? I fear I cannot do much at the moment; I was taken ill this morning.”

“So the prominent Zolraag learned,” Ssfeer said. “He-how say you? — he gives permissions to you to get well more slow. Bandits from Deutschland just now they-how say you? — shoot up radio, maybe to keep you quiet, not let you speak. We need maybe ten days to fix.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Russie said.

The Lancaster rumbled down the runway, engines roaring. The plane bounced and shuddered as it gained speed; Lizard bomblets had cratered the runway the week before, and repairs were crude. George Bagnall knew nothing but relief that they weren’t trying to take off with a full bomb load. Bombs were delicate things; once in a while, a bump would set one off… after which, the groundcrew would have another crater, a big one, to fill in.

The bomber fairly sprang into the air. In the pilot’s seat next to Bagnall’s, Ken Embry grinned. “Amazing what lightening the aircraft will do,” Embry said. “I feel like I’m flying a Spitfire.”

“I think it’s all in your head,” Bagnall replied. “The radar unit back there, can’t be a great deal lighter than the ordnance we usually carry.” The flight engineer flicked an intercom switch. “How is it doing, Radarman Goldfarb?”

“Seems all right,” he heard in his earphones. “I can see a long way.”

“That’s the idea,” Bagnall said. A radar set in an aircraft several miles above the Earth could peer farther around its curve pick up Lizard planes as they approached, and give England’s defenses a few precious extra minutes to prepare. Bagnall shivered inside his flight suit and furs as the Lanc gained altitude. He switched on his oxygen, tasted the rubber of the hose as he breathed the enriched air.

Goldfarb spoke enthusiastically. “If we can keep just a few planes in the air, they’ll do as much for us as all our ground stations put together. Of course,” he added, “we also have a good deal farther to fall.”

Bagnall tried not to think about that. The Lizards had pounded British ground radar in the opening days of their invasion, forcing the RAF and ground defenses to fight blind ever since. Now they were trying to see again. The Lizards were not likely to want to let them see.

“Coming up on angels twenty,” Ken Embry announced. “Taking station at the altitude. Radioman, how is our communication with the fighter pack?”

“Reading them five by five,” Ted Lane replied. “They report receiving us five by five as well. They are eager to begin the exercise, sir.”

“Bloody maniacs,” Embry said. “As far as I’m concerned, the ideal mission is one devoid of all contact with the enemy whatsoever.”

Bagnall could not have agreed more. Despite machine gun turrets all over the aircraft, the Lancaster had always been at a dreadful disadvantage against enemy fighters; evasion beat the blazes out of combat. The knowledge made bomber aircrew cautious, and made them view swaggering, aggressive fighter pilots as not quite right in the head.

From back in the bomb bay, David Goldfarb said, “I ought to be able to communicate directly with the fighter aircraft rather than relaying through the radioman.”

“That’s a good notion, Goldfarb,” Bagnall said. “Jot it down; maybe they’ll be able to use it on the Mark 2.” And maybe, if we keep on being luckier than we deserve, we’ll live to try out the Mark 2, he added to himself. He didn’t need to say it aloud; Goldfarb had known what the odds were when he volunteered for this mission.

Bagnall wiped the inside of the curved Perspex window in front of him with a piece of chamois cloth. Nothing much to see out there, not even the exhaust flames from other bombers ahead, above, below, and to either side-reassuring reminders one was not going into danger all alone. Now there was only night, night and the endless throb of the four Merlins. Consciously reminded of the engines, the flight engineer flicked his eyes over the gauges in front of him. Mechanically, all was well.

“I have enemy aircraft,” Goldfarb exclaimed. Back in the bomb bay, he couldn’t see even the night, just the tracks of electrons across a phosphor-coated screen. But his machine vision reached farther than Bagnall’s eyes. “I say again, I have enemy aircraft. Heading 177, distance thirty-five miles and closing, speed 505.”