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From his station in front of the now-dark radar screen, Goldfarb said, “The chaps on the ground have been listening to us, too. With a bit of luck, they’ll also have hurt the Lizards: at least, they’ll have had the advantage of knowing a bit sooner from which direction they’re coming.”
“Fat bloody lot of good it’ll do them,” Embry said. Like any pilot, he pretended to disbelieve flak crews could possibly hit anything with their guns. If that attitude made flying seem safer for him, Bagnall was not about to complain. A calm pilot was a smooth pilot, and a smooth pilot was likeliest to bring his aircrew home again.
Goldfarb repeated, “May I turn the set on again, sir?”
Embry took his right hand off the stick, pounded a closed fist up and down on his thigh. Bagnall didn’t think he knew he was doing it. At last the pilot said, “Yes, go ahead; you may as well. As you’ve noted, that is the purpose of our being up here on this lovely fall evening.”
“Really?” Bagnall said. “And all the time I thought it was to see how fast the Lizards could shoot us down. The groundcrew have formed a pool on it, I understand. Did you toss in your shilling, Ken?”
“I’m afraid not,” Embry answered, imperturbable. “When they told me someone had already chosen twenty seconds after takeoff, I decided my chances for winning were about nil, so I held onto my money out of consideration for my heirs. What about you, old fellow?”
“Sorry to have spoiled your wager, but I’m afraid I’m the chap who took the twenty seconds after we left the ground.” Bagnall was not about to let the pilot outdo him in offhandedness, not this time. “I admit I did wonder how I’d go about collecting if I happened to win.”
The radar set, like any human-built piece of electronic apparatus, needed a little while to warm up after it went on. Bagnall had heard rumors that Lizard gear taken from shot-down planes went on instantly. He wondered if they were true; from what he knew, valves (tubes, the Americans called them) by their very nature required warm-up time. Maybe the Lizards didn’t use valves, though he had no idea what might take their place.
“Another flight incoming, same bearing as before,” Goldfarb announced. “Range… twenty-three miles and closing too bloody fast. Shall I shut it down now?”
“No, wait until they launch their rockets at us,” Embry said. Bagnall wondered if the pilot had lost his mind, and. even wondered if there really was a groundcrew pool and if Embry was trying to win it. But Embry proved to have method in his madness: We’ve already seen we can evade the rockets that track us by our own radar. If we shut down before they fire those, they may get closer and shoot rockets of a different sort at us, ones we can’t evade.”
“Their tactics do tend to be stereotyped, don’t they?” Bagnall agreed after a little thought. “Given a choice, they’ll do the same thing over and over, regardless of whether it’s the right thing. And if it’s wrong, why give them the excuse to change?”
“Just what was in my-” Embry began.
Goldfarb interrupted him: “Rockets away! Shutting down-now.”
Again the Lancaster spun through the air; again Bagnall wondered if the fish and chips would stay down. And again, the Lizards’ rockets failed to bring down the British aircraft. “Maybe this isn’t a suicide mission after all,” Bagnall said happily. He’d had his doubts as the Lanc rolled down the runway.
Ted Lane listened to the surviving Mosquitoes as they made their runs at the attackers. “Another hit!” he said. This time, though, no one in the Lancaster shouted for joy. The aircrew had realized the price the fighter pilots were paying for every kill.
Then the radioman told Embry, “We are ordered to break off operations and return to base. The air vice marshal remarks that, having been lucky twice, he’s not inclined to tempt fate by pushing for a third bit of good fortune.”
“The air vice marshal is a little old woman,” the pilot retorted. He added hastily, “You need not inform him of my opinion, however. We shall of course obey his instructions like the good little children we are. Navigator, if you would be so kind as to suggest a course-”
“Suggest is the proper word, all right,” Alf Whyte said from his little curtained-off space behind the pilot’s and flight engineer’s seats. “What with some of the twists you put the aircraft through, I thought the compass was jitterbugging to a hot swing band. If we are where I think we are, a course of 078 will bring us to the general neighborhood of Dover in ten or twelve minutes.”
“Oh-seven-eight it is,” Embry said. “Turning to that course now.” He swung the bomber through the sky as if it were an extension of himself.
George Bagnall watched the neatly ordered phalanx of gauges in front of him as intently as if they monitored his own heartbeat and breathing. In a very real way, they did: if the Lancaster’s engines or hydraulic system failed, his heart would not go on beating for very long.
“I have contact with the airfield,” the radioman announced. “They read us five by five and report no damage from the Lizards this evening.”
“That’s good to hear,” Embry said. Bagnall nodded. The landing would be rough enough as it was, what with the hasty repairs to earlier repairs from the sky. The Lanc wouldn’t be coming in with combat damage or unexpended bombs, as it might have from a mission over Germany or France, but its fuel tanks were much fuller than they would have been on the return flight from such a mission. The petrol the plane burned made a more-than-satisfactory explosive when things went wrong.
Bagnall stared out through the Perspex. He tapped Embry on the arm. “Isn’t that the ocean approaching?”
Embry looked, too. “Sod me if it’s not. Alf, we’re coming up on the bloody North Sea. Are we north or south of where we want to be? I feel like a blind man tapping down the path with his stick, all the more so with that radar set back in the bomb bay. It ought to be able to find our way home for us all by its lonesome.”
“I dare say it will do precisely that one of these days,” the navigator answered. “I suggest you bear in mind, though, that the Lizards doubtless monitor every sort of signal we produce. Do you really care to guide them to the runway as you set down?”
“Now that you mention it, no. Ha!” Embry pointed down into the darkness. Bagnall’s eyes followed his finger. He too spied the red torch winking on and off. He flicked on the Lancaster’s wing lights, just for a moment, to acknowledge the signal.
Other torches, these white along one side of the runway and green along the other, sprang to life. Embry pointed. “Looks like a bloody aircraft carrier flight deck down there. I thought this was the RAF, not the Fleet Air Arm.”
“Could be worse,” Bagnall remarked. “At least the runway’s not pitching in a heavy sea.”
“There’s a cheerful thought.” Embry lined up the Lancaster on the two rows of torches, went into the final landing descent The hasty touchdown was less than smooth, but also less than disastrous: about par for a landing under war conditions, Bagnall thought. Along with the rest of the aircrew, he got out of the Lanc in a hurry and sprinted across the tarmac-now blacked out again-for the Nissen hut whose corrugated metal walls were surrounded by sandbags to protect against blast.
A tent of blackout curtains in front of the hut’s doorway let people go in and out without leaking light for all the world-and for unfriendly visitors from another world-to see. The glare of the bare bulbs strung from the Nissen hut’s ceiling smote Bagnall’s dark-accustomed eyes like a photographer’s flash.
The aircrew hurled themselves onto chairs and couches. Some, drained by the mission, fell asleep at once in spite of the glare. Others, Bagnall among them, dug out pipes and cigarettes.
“May I have one of those?” David Goldfarb asked, pointing to the flight engineer’s packet of Players. “I’m afraid I’m all out.”
Bagnall passed him a cigarette, leaned close to give him a light off the one he already had going. As the radarman inhaled, Bagnall said, “I expect you’ll be off to the White Horse Inn after the boffins get done gril
ling you over how things went tonight”
“What’s the point?” Goldfarb said, more in resignation than bitterness. “Oh, I expect I’ll drink there, but the girls-as I say, what’s the point?”
Bagnall also knew about the barmaids’ preferences. Now he stuck his tongue far into his cheek. “I think staring into the radar screen must have a deleterious effect on the brain. Did it never occur to you that you’ve just returned from flying a combat mission?”
