The driver pulled back on the reins. His two-horse team stopped. One of the animals bent its head and began pulling up grass. “Taxi ride’s done, lads,” the driver said. He pointed, “You go over there now.”
“Over there” was a Nissen hut, its semicylindrical bulk black against the slightly lighter sky. Goldfarb scrambled down from the wagon. He led the way toward the hut. Several of the other RAF men hung back, grumbling. He was glad he’d be returning to a job that could use his special skills. Any bloke could make an infantryman.
He opened the door and pushed his way through two blackout curtains. The light inside came from candles and lanterns, not electric fixtures, but still seemed bright to his night-accustomed eyes. A tired-looking flight sergeant waved him over to a desk piled high with forms. “All right, let’s see what we can do with you,” he said. He examined Goldfarb’s draggled uniform. “You’ve not had the easiest time of it, seems like.”
Goldfarb shrugged. “You do what you have to do.”
“That’s the way of it,” the flight sergeant said, nodding. He pulled out a form and a short nub of pencil. “Very good-stand and deliver.” Goldfarb rattled off his name-surname first, Christian name (an irony in his case), middle initial-rank, and service number. The flight sergeant wrote them down, then asked, “And your speciality, uh, Goldfarb?”
“I’m a radarman, sir.”
The flight sergeant started to write that down, too, then looked up sharply at Goldfarb. “Radarman? Somebody should have his bloody head examined, turning you into a ground-pounding Tommy. How the devil did that happen?”
“Sir, I was on duty south of Leicester when the Lizards hit my establishment. We beat them back, but they wrecked the place and scattered us to the four winds. I fell in with some soldiers, and-” He spread his hands. “You know how it is, sir. I was separated from my unit, but I still wanted to fight, and so I did.”
The flight sergeant sighed. “If I had a farthing for every time I’ve heard that story this past fortnight, I’d be the richest man in England, sure as hell. But a radarman-” His grin suddenly made him look younger than he had. “I’ll get a ‘well done’ for coming up with you, I will. What was your establishment, and what were you doing there?”
“I don’t like to say, sir,” Goldfarb answered. Radar had been a secret vital to conceal from the Germans when the war was young. The Lizards knew more about radar than any Englishman was likely to learn for the next generation, but old habits died hard.
“What was your establishment, and what did you do there?” the flight sergeant repeated with the air of a man used to cutting through multiple layers of nonsense. “Don’t waste my time.”
The rest of the RAF men stood before other desks, giving out their service records. Goldfarb surrendered: “Sir, I was at Bruntingthorpe, working under Group Captain Hipple to fit radar into Meteor jets and to see what we could learn from captured Lizard radars.”
“Then you bloody well ought to be court-martialed for letting anybody-and I mean up to field-marshal’s rank-take you away from what you were doing,” the flight sergeant said. At Goldfarb’s alarmed expression, he went on, “Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen. But getting yourself shot up would have been a bloody waste.”
“Sir, Bruntingthorpe had taken a hiding,” Goldfarb said defensively. “I don’t even know if Group Captain Hipple is alive or dead.”
“If he’s dead, someone else will be minding that store.” The flight sergeant spoke with conviction. “And if everyone above you has bought his plot, why, then the store is yours.”
“Mine?” Goldfarb was mortified when his voice rose to a startled squeak, but couldn’t help it. He stammered on: “I’m-I don’t know enough on my own. I-”
“If you know more about it than anyone else who might do it, it’ll be yours,” the flight sergeant said. He turned to the flying officer at the desk next to his. “Pardon me, sir, but I’ve a chap here who’s not only a radarman but has also been working on a couple of what sound like Most Secret projects.”
“Just you wait one moment,” the flying officer said to the aircraftman standing in front of him. He grilled Goldfarb for a minute or two, then raised his eyes to the heavens in an expression of theatrical despair. “You were at Bruntingthorpe, you say, and they drafted you into the infantry? Dear God in heaven, I sometimes think we deserve to lose this war as punishment for our own stupidity.”
“Sir, after the base took a pounding, I wanted to hit back at the Lizards any way I could,” Goldfarb said. “I wasn’t drafted into the infantry-I wanted to fight.”
“Young man, that only makes you a fool, too.” The flying officer might possibly have been two years older than Goldfarb. “You can do them much more damage fighting with your head than with a rifle. Flight Sergeant, get on the telephone to London. Ask them where the most fitting possible billet for your man is, then see that he gets to it.” He gave his attention back to the patiently waiting aircraftman. “Do carry on. You were saying landing gear was your maintenance speciality?”
“You come with me,” the flight sergeant told Goldfarb, rising from his desk.
Goldfarb came. “You can ring up London?” he asked, following the other RAF man out into the night. “I thought all telephone lines were long since wrecked.”
“All the civilian ones are, and likely to stay so,” the flight sergeant answered. “You want to be careful here; if you step off the path, you’ll be ankle-deep in muck. Can’t very well run a military outfit, though, without being able to talk back and forth, eh?”
“I suppose not.” Goldfarb couldn’t see the path he wasn’t supposed to step off of, which gave each step a certain feeling of adventure. He went on, “It must have been a bit dicey while the Lizards stood between here and London.”
“Oh, it was,” the flight sergeant agreed cheerily. “We were cut off a couple of times, as a matter of fact. But ground-laid cable is not what you’d call conspicuous, and we managed to infiltrate men to make repairs the couple of times it did get broken. Ah, here we are.”
He opened the door to a Maycrete building whose walls were already beginning to crumble even though they’d been up for only a couple of years. After the usual pair of blackout curtains, he and Goldfarb went into a stuffy little room where a corporal sat relaxing by what looked like a fancied-up version of an ordinary field telephone.
The corporal nodded to the flight sergeant. “ ‘Ello, Fred,” he said, dropping his aitches like the lower-class Londoner he undoubtedly was. “ ‘Oo’s this bloke wiv yer?”
“Flying officer says we’ve got to ring up London, figure out what the devil to do with him,” the flight sergeant-Fred-answered. “Get them on the horn for me, would you?”
“Right y’are.” The corporal vigorously turned the crank on the side of the telephone, then picked up the handset. Goldfarb watched the process with interest. Any new gadget fascinated him, and he hadn’t seen this model telephone before. He wished he could ask questions, but the corporal was intent on his task. Suddenly the fellow grinned and began to talk: “ ‘Ello, darlin’, I was ‘opin’ you’d be on tonight. ‘Ow’s tricks?”
“Chat her up another time, Nigel,” Fred said dryly. “This is business.”
The corporal nodded, saying, “Listen, love, put me through”-it came outfrew- ”to the blokes in Personnel, would you? That’s a lamb-we got us a square peg wot wants a round ‘ole.” He waited, then passed the handset to the flight sergeant.
Fred told Goldfarb’s story to whoever was on the other end in London. The longer he talked, the more excited he sounded and the more details he asked of Goldfarb. “Very good, sir. Thank you, sir,” he said at last. “I’ll see that he’s sent on there straightway.” He hung up.
“Sent on where?” Goldfarb asked.
“Dover,” the flight sergeant answered. “The Lizards never got that far, and I gather something which may interest you is going on there, though they wouldn’t tell me-What’s so funny?”