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“Ginger, hai,” Okamoto said. “Suppose I tell you that, after you go look at this uranium hexafluoride setup, we will give you not just ginger powder with your rice and fish, but pickled ginger root, as much as you can eat? You’d go then, neh?”
As much ginger as he could eat… did Tosev 3 hold that much ginger? The craving rose up and grabbed Teerts, like a hand around his throat. He needed all his will to say, “Superior sir, what good is ginger to me if I am not alive to taste it?”
Okamoto scowled again. He turned back to Nishina. “If he is not going to inspect the facility, do you have any more use for him today?” The physicist shook his head. To Teerts, Okamoto said, “Come along, then. I will take you back to your cell.”
Teerts followed Okamoto out of the laboratory. The guard followed them both. Even through the melancholy he felt after ginger’s exaltation left him, Teerts felt something akin to triumph.
That triumph faded as he went out onto the streets of Tokyo. Even more man than he had in Harbin, he felt himself a mote among the vast swarms of Big Uglies in those streets. He’d been alone in Harbin, yes, but the Race was advancing on the mainland city; had things gone well, he could have been reunited with his own kith at any time. But things had not gone well.
Here in Tokyo, even the illusion of rescue was denied him. Sea protected the islands at the heart of the Tosevite empire of Nippon from immediate invasion by the Race. He was irremediably and permanently at the mercy of the Big Uglies. They stared at him as he walked down the street; hatred seemed to rise from them in almost visible waves, like heat from red glowing iron. For once, he was glad to be between Major Okamoto and the guard.
Tokyo struck him as a curious mixture. Some of the buildings were of stone and glass, others-more and more outside the central city-of wood and what looked like thick paper. The two styles seemed incompatible, as if they’d hatched from different eggs. He wondered how and why they coexisted here.
Air-raid sirens began to wail. As if by magic, the streets emptied. Okamoto led Teerts into a packed shelter in the basement of one of the stone-and-glass buildings. Outside, antiaircraft guns started pounding. Teerts hoped all the Race’s pilots-males from his flight, perhaps-would return safely to their bases.
“Do you wonder why we hate you, when you do this to us?” Okamoto asked as the sharp, deep blasts of bombs contributed to the racket.
“No, superior sir,” Teerts answered. He understood it, well enough-and what it would do to him, sooner or later. His eye turrets swiveled this way and that. For the first time since he’d resigned himself to captivity, he began looking for ways to escape. He found none, but vowed to himself to keep looking.
Wearing His Majesty’s uniform once more felt most welcome to David Goldfarb. The ribbon of the Military Medal, in the colors of the Union Jack, held a new place of pride just above his left breast pocket. He’d imagined the only way a radarman could win a ground combat medal was to have the Jerries or the Lizards invade England. Going to Poland as a commando hadn’t been what he’d had in mind.
Bruntingthorpe had changed in the weeks he’d been away. More and more Pioneer and Meteor jet fighters sheltered in revetments. The place was becoming a working air base rather than an experimental station. But Fred Hipple’s team for evaluating Lizard engines and radars still worked here-and, Goldfarb had not been surprised to discover on his return, still shared a Nissen hut with the meteorologists. The one they had occupied was replaced, but somebody else worked in it these days.
He traded greetings with his comrades as he went in and got ready to go to work. The stuff brewing in the pot above the spirit lamp wasn’t exactly tea, but with plenty of honey it was drinkable. He poured himself a cup, adulterated it to taste, and went over to the Lizard radar unit.
It hadn’t languished while he’d been performing deeds of derring-do and speaking Yiddish. Another radarman, an impossibly young-looking fellow named Leo Horton, had made a good deal of progress on it in the interim.
“Morning to you,” Horton said in a nasal Devonshire accent.
“Morning,” Goldfarb agreed. He sipped the not-quite-tea, hoping this morning’s batch would carry a jolt. You couldn’t gauge that in advance these days. Sometimes you could drink it by the gallon and do nothing but put your kidneys through their paces; sometimes half a cup would open your eyes wide as hangar doors. It all depended on what went into the witches’ brew on any given day.
“I think I’ve made sense of some more of the circuitry,” Horton said. He was frightfully clever, with a theoretical background in electronics and physics Goldfarb couldn’t come close to matching. He also had a fine head for beer and, perhaps not least because he made them feel motherly, was cutting quite a swath through the barmaids up in Leicester. He reminded Goldfarb of an improved model of Jerome Jones, which was plenty to make him feel inadequate.
But business was business. “Good show,” Goldfarb said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“You see this set of circuits here?” Horton pointed to an area of the disassembled radar not far from the magnetron. “I’m pretty sure it controls the strength of the signal.”
“You know, I suspected that before I got drafted away from here,” Goldfarb said. “I didn’t have the chance to test it, though. What’s your evidence?”
Horton opened a fat notebook with a cover almost the exact dark blue of his RAF uniform. “Here, look at these oscilloscope readings when I shunt power through this lead here-”
He pointed again to show which one he meant.
“I think you’re right,” Goldfarb said. “And look at the amplification.” He whistled softly. “We wouldn’t just be promoted-we’d be bloody knighted if we found out how the Lizards do this and we could fit it into our own sets.”
“Too true, but good luck,” Horton replied. “I can tell you what those circuits do, but I will be damned if I have the, slightest notion of how they do it. If you took one of our Lancs and landed it at a Royal Flying Corps base in 1914-not that you could, because no runways then were anywhere near long enough-the mechanics then would stand a better chance of understanding the aircraft and all its systems than we do of making sense of-this.” He jabbed a thumb at the Lizard radar.
“It’s not quite so bad as that,” Goldfarb said. “Group Captain Hipple and his crew have made good progress with the engines.”
“Oh, indeed. But he’d already figured out the basic principles involved.”
“We have the basic principles of radar,” Goldfarb protested. “But their radar is further ahead of ours than their jet engines are,” Horton said. “It’s just the quality of the metallurgy that drives the group captain mad. Here, the Lizards are using a whole different technology to achieve their results: no valves, everything so small the circuits only come clear under the mi
croscope. Figuring out what anything does is a triumph; figuring out how it does it is a wholly different question.”
“Don’t I know it,” Goldfarb said ruefully. “There have been days-and plenty of ’em-when I’d sooner have kicked that bleeding radar out onto the rubbish pitch than worked on it.”
“Ah, but you have managed to get away for a bit.” Horton pointed to the Military Medal ribbon on Goldfarb’s chest. “I wish I’d had the chance to try to earn one of those.”
Remembering terror and flight, Goldfarb started to say he would have been just as glad not to have had the opportunity. But that wasn’t really true. Getting his cousin Moishe and his family out of Poland had been worth doing; he knew only pride that he’d been able to help there.
The other thing he noted, with a small shock, was the edge of genuine envy in Horton’s voice. The new radarman’s savvy had intimidated him ever since he got back to Bruntingthorpe. Finding out that Horton admired him was like a tonic. He remembered the gap that had existed back at Dover between those who went up to do battle in the air and those who stayed behind and fought their war with electrons and phosphors.
But Goldfarb had crossed to the far side of that gap. Even before he went to Poland, he’d gone aloft in a Lancaster to test the practicability of airborne radar sets. He’d taken Lizard fire then, too, but returned safely. Ground combat, though, was something else again, If one of those Lizard rockets had struck the Lanc, he never would have seen the alien who killed him. Ground combat was personal. He’d shot people and Lizards in Lodz and watched them fall. He still had nasty dreams about it.
Leo Horton was still waiting for an answer. Goldfarb said, “In the long run, what we do here will have more effect on how the war ends than anything anyone accomplishes gallivanting about with a bloody knife between his teeth.”
“You go gallivanting about with a knife between your teeth and it’ll turn bloody in short order, that’s for certain,” Horton said.
