“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 grilling 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?”
The end of Goldfarb’s cigarette suddenly glowed a fierce red.
His eyes glowed, too. “I knew it only too bleeding well when those Lizard rockets homed on us. I confess I hadn’t thought of it in other terms, though. Thank you, sir.”
Bagnall waved a hand in a parody of aristocratic elegance. “Delighted to be of service.” Service it had been, too-in an instant, he’d made the radarman forget all about the fear he’d just endured. He wished he could perform the same service for himself.
12
Ussmak cursed the day the Race had first discovered Tosev 3. He cursed the day the probe the Race had sent to this miserable world returned safely. He cursed the day he’d been hatched, the day he’d gone into cold sleep, the day he’d awakened. He cursed Krentel, something he’d been doing every day since the blundering idiot replaced Votal. He cursed the Big Uglies for killing Votal and then Telerep and leaving Krentel alive.
Most of all, he cursed the mud.
The landcruiser he drove was built to handle difficult terrain. On the whole, it did well. But Tosev 3, being a wetter place than any of the three worlds already in the Empire, had mixtures of water and dirt more thorough and more spectacularly gloppy than any of the Race’s engineers had imagined.
Ussmak was in the middle of one of those mixtures. As far as he could tell, it was most of a continent wide and most of a continent long. The Russkis only made matters worse by not paving any of their stinking roads. Once the rain soaked into what was allegedly a roadbed, the mud there was most of a continent deep, too.
He pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The landcruiser lurched forward. So long as he moved every little while, he was all right. If he stayed too long in one place, the machine started to sink. Its tracks were more than wide enough to support it on any reasonable surface. This gluey, slimy stuff was a long way from reasonable.
Ussmak accelerated again. The landcruiser plowed through the bog. Its tracks flung muck in all directions. Some of the muck-dead Emperors only knew how-splashed down onto Ussmak’s vision slit. He pressed a button. Detergent solution sprayed the armorglass clean. That was a relief. At least he wouldn’t have to unbutton and stick his head into the refrigerator outside.