Down to Earth by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

“Some of those blokes”—he had Group Captain Basil Roundbush, a former colleague and current oppressor, in mind—“have got themselves rich off the smuggling trade.”
    “None of which has anything to do with you,” the group captain told him, his voice suddenly distant and chilly. “Nor can I in good conscience accept a resignation based on petty personal problems. Accordingly, your request is denied, and you will return to your normal duties at once.”
    “What?” David yelped. “You can’t do that!”
    “Not only can I, Flight Lieutenant, I just have,” Paston answered.
    He was right—he could. Goldfarb hadn’t expected that he would, though. Paston had always been pretty decent, as far as commanding officers went. But Goldfarb had point-blank refused to do any more smuggling for Basil Roundbush, and Roundbush had promised he’d regret it. “My God!” he burst out. “They’ve told you to keep me stuck in the service so I can’t leave the country!” He didn’t know exactly who
they
were, but he did know Roundbush had friends in high places.
    “I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about,” Group Captain Paston said, but for the first time he spoke with something less than perfect self-assurance. “And I have given you quite enough of my time, too.”
    “You want to be rid of me,” Goldfarb said. “Well, I want to be rid of the RAF I’ll do that any way I have to, believe me.”
    “By a deliberate show of disobedience or incompetence, do you mean?” Paston asked, and David nodded. The radar-station commander gave him a thin, chilly smile. “If you try that, Flight Lieutenant, you will indeed leave the RAF. You will leave it with a bad-conduct discharge, I promise you. And you are welcome to see how well you do emigrating with that on your record.”
    Goldfarb stared at him in dismay. He could have said several different things. Any one of them might have brought him the sort of discharge Group Captain Paston had mentioned. At last, after some effort, he managed, “I believe that’s most unjust, sir.”
    “I’m sorry you think so,” Paston said. “But I have already told you I have no more time to listen to your complaints. You are dismissed.”
    “Why, you—” Again, David Goldfarb bit back a response that would have landed him in trouble. Shaking, he got to his feet. As he turned to leave the group captain’s office, though, he couldn’t help adding, “They
have
got to you.”
    Paston busied himself with the papers in his in basket. Goldfarb didn’t think he was going to answer, but he did: “We all have to do certain things for the sake of the service as a whole, Flight Lieutenant.”
    “And I’m the pawn to be sacrificed, is that it?” Goldfarb said. This time, Group Captain Paston didn’t reply, but he didn’t really need to, either.
    Still shaking his head in disgust, Goldfarb strode out of his office. He didn’t slam the door behind him, however much he wanted to. That would have been a petty revenge, and the revenge he wanted was anything but petty. How to get it without ending up in trouble much worse than a bad-conduct discharge was, unfortunately, another question altogether.
    A couple of enlisted men saluted him as he walked out into the watery February sunshine that was the best Belfast had to offer. To them, his officer’s uniform spoke more loudly than his sallow skin, his beak of a nose, and his curly hair of a brown (now graying) not quite the right shade for one whose ancestors were respectably Anglo-Saxon or Celtic. Goldfarb snorted bitterly as he returned the salutes. He wished his superiors thought the same way.
    What am I going to do?
he wondered. He knew he had to do something. Staying in a Britain slowly succumbing to the embrace of the
Reich
didn’t bear thinking about. His parents had seen the writing on the wall and escaped from Poland. His wife’s parents had got her out of Germany not long before the
Kristallnacht
spelled