Goldfarb’s first reaction was to grab for a pistol. Unfortunately, he wasn’t wearing one. Roundbush was, and had it out with commendable speed. “No need for that,” the much-decorated captain said. “Mzepps is quite tame, and so am I: Donald Mather, at your service.”
After his first instant of surprise, Basil Roundbush had taken a good look at Mather’s uniform. The pistol went back into its holster. “He’s SAS, David,” he said. “I expect he can protect us from a Lizard or two… dozen.” He sounded more serious than he normally would have while making such a crack.
Goldfarb took a second look at Mather and concluded Roundbushwas serious. The captain was a handsome chap in a blond, chisel-featured way, and seemed affable enough, but something about his eyes warned that getting on his wrong side would be a mistake-quite likely a fatal mistake. And he hadn’t won those medals for keeping the barracks clean and tidy, either.
“Sir, what will we do with-Mzepps, did you say?” he asked.
“Mzepps, yes,” Mather answered, pronouncing eachp separately. “I expect he might be useful to you: he’s a radar technician, you see. I’ll stay around to interpret till the two of you understand each other well enough, then I’ll be on my merry way. He does speak a little English now, but he’s far from fluent.”
“A radar technician?” Basil Roundbush said softly. “Oh, David, you are a lucky sod. You know that, don’t you? That peach of a girl, now a Lizard of your very own to play with.” He rounded on Mather. “You don’t happen to have a jet-engine specialist concealed anywhere about your person, do you? We have this lovely video platter here on how to service their bloody engines, and knowing what the words mean would help us understand the pictures.”
Captain Mather actually did look up his sleeve. “Nothing here, I’m afraid.” The dispassionate tone of the reply only made it more absurd. Mzepps spoke up in the Lizards’ hissing language. Mather listened to him, then said, “He tells me he was kept with a couple of jet-engine men, er, Lizards, back in-well, you don’t need to know that. Where he was before. They like it where they are, he says. Why was that, Mzepps?” He repeated the question in the Lizards’ speech, listened to the answer, laughed, and reported back: “They like it because the bloke they’re working with is hardly bigger than they are… Hullo! What’s got into you two?”
Goldfarb and Roundbush had both let out yelps of delight. Goldfarb explained: “That has to be Group Captain Hipple. We both thought he’d bought his plot when the Lizards jumped on Bruntingthorpe with both feet. First word we’ve had he’s alive.”
“Ah. That is a good show,” Mather said. He snapped his fingers and pointed at Goldfarb. “Something I was supposed to tell you, and I nearly forgot.” He looked angry at himself: he wasn’t supposed to forget things. “You’re cousin to that Russie chap, aren’t you?” Without waiting for Goldfarb’s startled nod, he went on, “Yes, of course you are. I ought to let you know that, not so very long ago, I put him and his family on a boat bound for Palestine, on orders of my superiors.”
“Did you?” Goldfarb said tonelessly. “Thank you for telling me, sir. Other than that-” He shook his head. “I got them out of Poland so the Lizards wouldn’t do their worst to him, and now he’s back in another country they’ve overrun. Have you heard any word of him since he got there?”
“I’m afraid not,” Mather answered. “I’ve not even heardthat he got there. You know how security is.” He seemed faintly embarrassed. “I daresay I shouldn’t have told you what I just did, but blood’s thicker than water, what?”
“Yes.” Goldfarb gnawed on his lower lip. “Better to know, I suppose.” He wasn’t sure he meant what he said. He felt helpless. But then, Mather might as easily have brought news that Moishe and Rivka and Reuven had been killed in a Lizard air raid on London. There was still hope. Clinging to it, he said, “Well, we haven’t much choice but to get on with it, have we?”
“Right you are,” Mather said, and Goldfarb gathered he’d made a favorable impression. The SAS man went on, “Only way to keep from going mad is to carry on.”
How very British,Goldfarb thought, half ruefully, half in admiration. “Let’s find out what Mzepps knows about radars, and what he can tell us about the sets we’ve captured from his chums.”
Before that first day’s work with the Lizard prisoner was done, he learned as much in some areas as he had in months of patient-and sometimes not so patient-trial and error. Mzepps gave him the key to the color-coding system the Lizards used for their wires and electrical components: far more elaborate and more informative than the one with which Goldfarb had grown up. The Lizard also proved a deft technician, showing the RAF radarman a dozen quick tricks, maybe more, that made assembling, disassembling, and troubleshooting radars easier.
But when it came to actually repairing the sets, he was less help. Through Mather, Goldfarb asked him, “What do you do when this unit goes bad?” He pointed to the gadgetry that controlled the radar wavelength. He didn’t know how it did that, but more cut and try had convinced him it did.
Mzepps said, “You remove the module and replace it with one in good working order.” He reached into the radar. “See, it snaps in and out like this. Very easy.”
It was very easy. From an accessibility standpoint, the Lizards’ sets beat what the RAF made all hollow. The Lizards designed them so they not only worked but were also convenient to service. A lot of good engineering had gone into that. British engineers had just got to the point of being able to design radars that worked. Every time he looked at the cat’s cradle of wires and resistors and capacitors and the rest of the electronics that made up the guts of an RAF set, Goldfarb was reminded that they hadn’t yet concerned themselves with convenience.
But Mzepps hadn’t quite grasped what he’d meant. “I see how you replace it, yes. But suppose you haven’t got a replacement for the whole unit. Suppose you want to repair the part in it that’s gone bad? How do you diagnose which part that is, and how do you fix it?”
Captain Mather put the revised question to the Lizard. “No can do,” Mzepps said in English. He went on in his own language. Mather had to stop and ask more questions a couple of times. At last he gave Goldfarb the gist: “He says it really can’t be done, old man. That’s a unitary assembly. If one part of it goes, the whole unit’s buggered for fair.” Mzepps added something else. Mather translated again: “The idea is that it shouldn’t break down to start with.”
“If he can’t fix it when it breaks, what the devil good is he?” Goldfarb said. As far as he was concerned, you had no business mucking about with electronics without some notion of the theory behind the way the machines worked-and if you understood the theory, you were halfway to being able to jury-rig a fix when something went wrong. And something would go wrong.
After a moment, he realized he wasn’t quite fair. Plenty of people ran motorcars without knowing more about how they worked than where to put in the petrol and how to patch a punctured inner tube. Still, he wouldn’t have wanted one of those people on his team if he were driving a race car.
Mzepps might have been thinking along with him. Through Captain Mather, the Lizard said, “The task of a technician is to know which unit is ailing. We cannot manufacture components for our sets on this planet, anyhow. Your technology is too primitive. We have to use what we brought with us.”
Goldfarb imagined a Victorian expeditionary force stranded in darkest Africa. The British soldiers could cut a great swath through the natives-as long as their ammunition held out, their Maxim guns didn’t break some highly machined part, their horses didn’t start dying of sleeping sickness, and they didn’t come down with malaria or yaws or whatever you came down with in darkest Africa (sure as hell, you’d come down with something). If that Victorian army was stuck there, without hope of rescue…