Harry Turtledove - Down to Earth

“Not only can I, Flight Lieutenant, I just have,” Paston answered.

He was right-he could. Goldfarb hadn’t expected that he would, though. Paston had always been pretty decent, as far as commanding officers went. But Goldfarb had point-blank refused to do any more smuggling for Basil Roundbush, and Roundbush had promised he’d regret it. “My God!” he burst out. “They’ve told you to keep me stuck in the service so I can’t leave the country!” He didn’t know exactly who they were, but he did know Roundbush had friends in high places.

“I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about,” Group Captain Paston said, but for the first time he spoke with something less than perfect self-assurance. “And I have given you quite enough of my time, too.”

“You want to be rid of me,” Goldfarb said. “Well, I want to be rid of the RAF I’ll do that any way I have to, believe me.”

“By a deliberate show of disobedience or incompetence, do you mean?” Paston asked, and David nodded. The radar-station commander gave him a thin, chilly smile. “If you try that, Flight Lieutenant, you will indeed leave the RAF. You will leave it with a bad-conduct discharge, I promise you. And you are welcome to see how well you do emigrating with that on your record.”

Goldfarb stared at him in dismay. He could have said several different things. Any one of them might have brought him the sort of discharge Group Captain Paston had mentioned. At last, after some effort, he managed, “I believe that’s most unjust, sir.”

“I’m sorry you think so,” Paston said. “But I have already told you I have no more time to listen to your complaints. You are dismissed.”

“Why, you-” Again, David Goldfarb bit back a response that would have landed him in trouble. Shaking, he got to his feet. As he turned to leave the group captain’s office, though, he couldn’t help adding, “They have got to you.”

Paston busied himself with the papers in his in basket. Goldfarb didn’t think he was going to answer, but he did: “We all have to do certain things for the sake of the service as a whole, Flight Lieutenant.”

“And I’m the pawn to be sacrificed, is that it?” Goldfarb said. This time, Group Captain Paston didn’t reply, but he didn’t really need to, either.

Still shaking his head in disgust, Goldfarb strode out of his office. He didn’t slam the door behind him, however much he wanted to. That would have been a petty revenge, and the revenge he wanted was anything but petty. How to get it without ending up in trouble much worse than a bad-conduct discharge was, unfortunately, another question altogether.

A couple of enlisted men saluted him as he walked out into the watery February sunshine that was the best Belfast had to offer. To them, his officer’s uniform spoke more loudly than his sallow skin, his beak of a nose, and his curly hair of a brown (now graying) not quite the right shade for one whose ancestors were respectably Anglo-Saxon or Celtic. Goldfarb snorted bitterly as he returned the salutes. He wished his superiors thought the same way.

What am I going to do? he wondered. He knew he had to do something. Staying in a Britain slowly succumbing to the embrace of the Reich didn’t bear thinking about. His parents had seen the writing on the wall and escaped from Poland. His wife’s parents had got her out of Germany not long before the Kristallnacht spelled the beginning of the end for Jews there. Waiting for trouble to land wasn’t in his blood, or Naomi’s, either.

Without leaving the RAF, he couldn’t go to Canada, and he couldn’t get out of the RAF. He didn’t think he could go to the United States, either, though the secretary at the American consulate hadn’t been quite so definite about it. “Have to find out,” he muttered under his breath.

Suppose the Yanks said no? He didn’t want to suppose that. He wanted to suppose anything but that. The way his luck was running, though-the way Basil Roundbush and his pals were helping to make his luck run-he wouldn’t have bet on anything going his way.

“Where else can I go?” Another question, this one addressed to the washed-out, smoke-stained sky. The few bits of Europe the Germans didn’t occupy were far more subservient to the Reich than the United Kingdom. The Soviet Union? He snorted again. That would be jumping back into the frying pan his parents had fled. The Russians might want him for what he knew about radars, but that didn’t mean they’d treat him like anything but a damn Jew.

Goldfarb was about to climb aboard his bicycle to ride back to his flat in the officers’ housing and give Naomi the bad news when he paused. If all he wanted was to escape Britain, he was leaving more than half the world out of his calculations-the part the Lizards ran.

“Well, it’s no wonder I didn’t think of that straight off,” he said, as if someone had asserted the opposite. He’d fought the Lizards even harder than he’d fought the Nazis. He’d gone into a Polish prison carrying a Sten gun to get his cousin Moishe Russie out of there, and he’d fought with everything he could get his hands on when the Race invaded England.

And now he wanted to live under their rule?

He shook his head. He didn’t want to. Living under the rule of the Race was one of the last things he wanted to do. But staying in Britain any longer was the very last thing he wanted to do.

After a moment, he shook his head again. That wasn’t right. He might think it was when he was feeling down, but it wasn’t. Getting arrested in Marseille had been very instructive in that regard. He would much sooner have tried to spend the rest of his life in Britain than set foot in the Greater German Reich again for even ten minutes-which was about how long he thought he’d last.

“And I’ve even got wires to pull,” he murmured. These days, Moishe Russie, far from languishing in a Lizard prison, sometimes advised the fleetlord himself on how to deal with troublesome Tosevites. His cousin’s influence had got him out of that Nazi gaol. Maybe it could get him out of Britain, too.

He swung onto the bicycle and started to ride. As he did so, a new name welled up in his mind. Palestine. His cousin Moishe lived in Jerusalem. He’d gone there after the Nazis resentfully turned him loose. What would living in Palestine be like?

Next year in Jerusalem. For how many centuries had that been a Jewish prayer? Could he make it come true?

An Austin-Healey almost ran him over. He shouted something unkind at the driver, who kept on going without a clue about the near miss. Goldfarb had had to make his way against the tide of anti-Semitism throughout his life. He’d conducted himself creditably in combat on the ground and in the air, and had the medal ribbons above his breast pocket to prove it. Against idiot drivers, though, the gods contended in vain.

After his brush with death, Goldfarb realized he’d asked himself the wrong question. He thought he had a good chance of being able to move his family to Palestine if he couldn’t get to Canada or the USA. Which counted for more, freedom or simple survival?

“How much freedom will I have ten years from now if I stay here?” he mused. “How much will my children have?” He didn’t like the answers he found for either of those questions. His parents had known enough to get out when the getting was good. So had Naomi’s. That made up his mind for him. If traffic didn’t do him in, he’d keep trying to escape, even if escape meant Palestine.

Little by little, Jerusalem began to settle down after the latest round of Arab rioting. Reuven Russie shook his head as he walked toward the medical college that bore his father’s name. It wasn’t so much that Jerusalem was settling down as that the riots had a few days between them now rather than coming one on the heels of another. When the Arabs erupted, they were as fierce as ever.