In the Balance by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

without her: when she tried to stop, she found she couldn’t.
    Slowly, slowly, it stopped being the only sound in her universe. Other noises penetrated, cheerful
pop-pop-pops
like strings of firecrackers going off. But they were not firecrackers. They were rifles. Japanese soldiers were on the way.
    David Goldfarb watched the green glow of the radar screen at Dover Station, waiting for the swarm of moving blips that would herald the return of the British bomber armada. He turned to the fellow technician beside him. “I’m sure as hell gladder to be looking for our planes coming back than I was year before last, watching every German in the whole wide world heading straight for London.”
    “You can say that again.” Jerome Jones rubbed his weary eyes. “It was a bit dicey there for a while, wasn’t it?”
    “Just a bit, yes.” Goldfarb leaned back in his uncomfortable chair, hunched his shoulders. Something in his neck went
snap
. He grunted with relief, then grunted again as he thought about Jones’s reply. He’d lived surrounded by British reserve all his twenty-three years, even learned to imitate it, but it still seemed unnatural to him.
    His newlywed parents had fled to London to escape Polish pogroms a little before the start of the first World War. A stiff upper lip was not part of the scanty baggage they’d brought with them; they shouted at each other, and eventually at David and his brothers and sister, sometimes angrily,more often lovingly, but always at full throttle. He’d never learned at home to hold back, which made the trick all the harder anywhere else.
    The reminiscent smile he’d worn for a moment quickly faded. By the news dribbling out, pogroms rolled through Poland again, worse under the Nazis than ever under the tsars. When Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia, Saul Goldfarb had written to his own brothers and sisters and cousins in Warsaw, urging them to get out of Poland while they could. No one left. A few months later, it was too late to leave.
    A blip on the screen snapped him out of his unhappy reverie. “Blimey,” Jones breathed, King’s English cast aside in surprise, “lookit that bugger go.”
    “I’m looking,” Goldfarb said. He kept on looking, too, until the target disappeared again. It didn’t take long. He sighed. “Now we’ll have to fill out a pixie report.”
    “Third one this week,” Jones observed. “Bloody pixies’re getting busier, whatever the hell they are.”
    “Whatever,” Goldfarb echoed. For the past several months, radars in England—and, he gathered unofficially, the United States as well—had been showing phantom aircraft flying impossibly high and even more impossibly fast; 90,000 feet and better than 2,000 miles an hour were the numbers he’d heard most often. He said, “I used to think they came from something wrong in the circuits somewhere. I’ve seen enough now, though, that I have trouble believing it.
    “What else could they be?” Jones still belonged to the circuitry-problem school. He fired off the big guns of its argument: “They aren’t ours. They don’t belong to the Yanks. And if they were Jerry’s they’d be dropping things on our heads. What does that leave? Men from Mars?
    “Laugh all you like,” Goldfarb said stubbornly. “If there’s something wrong in the machinery’s guts, why can’t the boffins find it and fix it?”
    “Crikey, I don’t think even the blokes who invented this beast know what all it can and can’t do,” Jones retorted.
    Since that was unquestionably true Goldfarb didn’t respond to it directly. Instead, he said, “So why has the machinery only started finding pixies now? Why didn’t they show up on the screens from the first day?”
    “If the boffins can’t figure it out, how do you expect me to know?” Jones said. “Pull out a bloody pixie report form, will you? With luck, we can get it done before we spot the bombers. Then we won’t have to worry about it