Flight Lieutenant David Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Another American launch,” he remarked. “The Yanks have been busy the past couple of weeks, haven’t they?”
“Aye, sir,” Sergeant Jack McKinnon answered. He chuckled. “Likely they’ve got a lot o’ ginger to fly up to all those poor Lizards who’ve had to do without their womenfolks for so long.” He laughed at his own wit.
So did Goldfarb, but he had a harder time of it. He wished the Lizards had never discovered that ginger made their females randy. Such a discovery could only mean they’d want more of the stuff. Oh, their leaders would do their best to keep them from getting more, but those same leaders had been doing their best for a long time. They’d had little luck yet.
He didn’t think they’d have much luck in future, either. He sighed-not too loud, so the sergeant wouldn’t notice. That meant Group Captain Roundbush would keep moving the stuff by the bushel basket, which meant Roundbush was liable to ask him for more help one day before too long.
And he would have to give it. The way things were in Britain these days, he would have to do whatever Roundbush told him to do. The group captain had said he would help Goldfarb emigrate. With each passing day, that looked like a better idea… if Roundbush had told the truth.
Putting the group captain out of his mind-for a little while-Goldfarb studied the radar screen. “Looks like they’re going hammer and tongs at that space station of theirs,” he remarked. “They’ll really have something when they finally get it done.”
“Oh, that they will, sir-summat grand.” But McKinnon, in spite of what he said, did not sound as if he agreed with Goldfarb. A moment later, he explained why: “And once they’ve got it, what will they do with it? What good will it do them? We can get our toes out into space, aye, but it really belongs to the Lizards.”
“For now it does, yes,” Goldfarb admitted. “And it doesn’t look like it’ll ever belong to Britain, does it?” Saying that pained him. Back before the Lizards came, Britain had been at the forefront of science and technology. British radar had kept the Nazis from invading in 1940. British jet engines had been well in advance of everybody else’s, including the Germans’. When space travel came, what was more natural than to assume it would come from the British Empire?
But the British Empire was only a memory now. And the British Isles lacked the resources for a space program of their own. What resources they had, they’d put into landand submarine-based rockets with which they could make any invader-Lizards, Nazis, even Americans-pay a dreadful price.
And so Britain remained independent. But the continentbestriding powers-the USA, the USSR, the Greater German Reich — also strode beyond the planets, strode on the moon, on Mars, and even on the asteroids. As a boy, Goldfarb had dreamt of being the first man on the moon, of walking beside a Martian canal.
A Nazi had been the first man on the moon. There were no Martian canals. So the Lizards said, and they turned out to be right. They still couldn’t understand why men wanted to set foot on such a useless, worthless world.
Goldfarb understood it. But, even for the Yanks who’d gone to Mars and then come home again, it must have seemed like a consolation prize. Whatever people did in space, the Lizards had done it thousands of years before.
“If we could build a ship that would pay a call on Home, that would be something,” Goldfarb said dreamily.
“It’d be summat the Lizards didn’t fancy, and go ahead and try telling me I’m wrong, sir,” McKinnon said. “That’d be the last thing they wanted: us coming to pay them a call, I mean.”
“So it would. They wouldn’t know what kind of call we aimed to pay them,” Goldfarb answered. He thought about it for a moment. “And I’m damned if I know what kind of call we ought to pay them, either. It would be nice if we could give them as much to think about as they’ve given us, wouldn’t it?”
McKinnon’s expression of naked longing reminded Goldfarb that the Scot’s relatively recent ancestors had been in the habit of painting themselves blue and swinging claymores as tall as they were. “Aye, wouldn’t it be sweet to drop a nice, fat atomic bomb down the Emperor’s chimney? The Lizards could scarce blame us, not after all they’ve done here.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that would stop them from blaming us.” Goldfarb’s voice was dry. “What I’d like to do, though, is send ships to other planets in the Empire and see if we could free the Rabotevs and Hallessi. They can’t like the Lizards lording it over them, can they?”
But even as he said that, he wondered. The Lizards had ruled those other two worlds for a long time. Maybe the aliens on them really did take the Empire for granted. People didn’t work that way, but the Lizards didn’t work like people, so why should their subjects? And people hadn’t ruled other people for anywhere near that many thousand years. Maybe obedience, even acquiescence, had become ingrained into the natives of Halless 1 and Rabotev 2.
“Might be worth finding out,” McKinnon said. “Pity they aren’t closer. Likely wouldn’t do, sending leaflets through space to ’em.”
“Workers of the worlds, unite!” Goldfarb said, grinning. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
The joke should have gone over better than it did. McKinnon’s smile, now, looked distinctly strained. His lips moved-silently, but Goldfarb had no trouble understanding the word they shaped. Bolshie.
It could have been worse. McKinnon could have said it out loud. That might have wrecked Goldfarb’s career for good, assuming his being a Jew hadn’t already done the job. Being labeled a Bolshevik Jew in a country tilting toward the Greater German Reich wasn’t just asking for trouble. It was begging for trouble on bended knee.
“Never mind,” Goldfarb said wearily. “Never bloody mind. That’ll teach me to try to be bloody funny, won’t it?”
McKinnon stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. Goldfarb was not in the habit of making his speech so peppery. He was not in the habit of banging his head against a stone wall, either. He wondered why not. Metaphorically, he did it every day. Why not be literal about it, too?
He looked at his watch. The luminous dots by the numbers and the hands told him the time in the darkened room. “Shift’s almost over,” he remarked in something close to his normal tone of voice. “Thank heaven.”
Jack McKinnon did not argue with him. Maybe that meant the veteran sergeant would be relieved to go outside and get some fresh air, or something as close to it as Belfast’s sooty atmosphere yielded. But maybe, and more likely, it meant McKinnon would be glad to escape from being cooped up in the same room with a damned crazy Jew.
At last, after what certainly seemed like forever, McKinnon and Goldfarb’s reliefs showed up. The Scotsman hurried away without words, without even his usual, See you tomorrow. He would see Goldfarb tomorrow, whether he liked it or not. Not, at the moment, seemed ahead on points.
Shaking his head, Goldfarb got onto his bicycle and pedaled for home as fast as he could. Since everyone else in Belfast had got off at about the same time, that was not very fast. He hated traffic jams. Too many people in motorcars pretended they could not see the plebeians on bicycles. He had to swerve sharply a couple of times to keep from getting hit.
When he did get back to his flat in the married officers’ quarters, he was something a good deal less than his best. Normally patient with his children, he barked at them till they retreated in dismay. He barked at Naomi, too, something he scarcely ever did. She used a privilege denied the children and barked back. That brought him up short.
“Here,” she said with brisk practicality. “Drink this.” This was a couple of jiggers of neat whiskey poured into a glass. “Maybe it will make you decent company again. If it doesn’t, it will put you to sleep.”