So did Goldfarb, but he ate the dark without complaint; it was vastly better than anything they made back at the aerodrome. The two RAF men each bought another round. Then, regretfully, they rode back to the base. Keeping bicycles on a steady course seemed complicated after four pints of even bad bitter.
The headache Goldfarb had the next morning told him he probably shouldn’t have drunk the last one. Basil Roundbush looked disgustingly fresh. Goldfarb did his best to keep Group Captain Hipple from noticing he was hung over. He thought he succeeded, and got help because no one was working at his best, not only because of yesterday’s raid, but also because everyone was looking forward to examining the wreckage from the Lizard plane.
Said wreckage did not arrive until nearly eleven, which put everyone, even the patient, mild-mannered Hipple, on edge. When it finally happened, though, the arrival was a portent: the fragments came to Bruntingthorpe aboard a pair of 6x6 GMC trucks.
The big rumbling American machines seemed to Goldfarb almost as great a prodigy as the cargo they bore. Next to them, the British lorries he was used to were awkward makeshifts, timid and underpowered. If the Lizards hadn’t come, thousands of these broad-shouldered bruisers would have been hauling men and equipment all around England. As it was, only the earliest handful of arrivals were working here. The Yanks had more urgent use for the rest on their own side of the Atlantic.
That a couple of the precious American lorries had been entrusted with their present cargo spoke volumes about how important the RAF reckoned it. The lorries also boasted winches, which helped get the pieces out of the cargo compartments: radar and engine, especially the latter, were too heavy for convenient manhandling.
“We have to get these under cover as quickly as we can,” Hipple said. “We don’t want Lizard reconnaissance aircraft noting that we’re trying to learn their secrets.”
Even as he spoke, men from the groundcrew were draping camouflage netting over the wreckage. Before long, it looked pretty much like meadow from above. Goldfarb said, “They’ll expect us to rebuild the Nissen hut they wrecked yesterday. When we do, it might be worthwhile to move this gear into it. That way, the Lizards won’t be able to tell we have it.”
“Very good suggestion, David,” Hipple said, beaming. “I expect we’ll do that as soon as we have the opportunity. Yet no matter how quickly they can run up a Nissen hut, we shan’t wait for them. I want to attack these beasts as rapidly as possible, as I’m certain you do also.”
There Hipple was right. Even though it was gloomy under the netting, Goldfarb got to work right away. The Lizard plane must have come down on its belly rather than nose first, a happy accident that had indeed kept it from being too badly smashed up. Part of the streamlined nose assembly remained in place in front of the parabolic radar antenna.
The antenna itself had escaped crumpling. It was smaller than Goldfarb had expected; for that matter, the whole unit was smaller than he’d expected. The Lizards had mounted it in front of their pilot-that was obvious. It was good design; Goldfarb wished the set that would go into the Meteor was small enough to imitate it.
Some of the sheet metal around the radar had torn. Peering through a gap, Goldfarb saw bundles of wires with bright-colored insulation. Coded somehow, he thought, wishing he knew which color meant what.
Even wrecked, the finish of the Lizard aircraft was very fine. Welds were smooth and flat, rivets countersunk so their heads lay flush with the metal skin. Even tugging with pliers at a tear in the metal to widen it so he could reach inside felt like tampering to Goldfarb.
Behind the radar antenna lay the magnetron; he recognized the curved shape of its housing. It was the last piece of apparatus he did recognize. Things that looked like screws held it to the rest of the unit. They did not, however, have conventional heads. Instead of openings for a flat-blade or Phillips-head screwdriver, they had square cavities sunk into the centers of the heads.
Goldfarb rummaged through the tools on his belt till he found a flat-blade screwdriver whose blade fit across the diagonal of one of the Lizard screws. He turned it. Nothing happened. He gave the screw a hard look that quickly turned speculative and tried to turn it the other way. It began to come out.
Bad language was coming from the RAF men working on the engine. Suspecting he knew why, Goldfarb called, “The screws are backwards to ours: anticlockwise tightens, clockwise loosens.”
He heard a couple of seconds’ silence, then a grunt of satisfaction. Fred Hipple said, “Thank you, David. Lord only knows how long that would have taken to occur to us. One can sometimes become too wedded to the obvious.”
Goldfarb fairly burst with pride. This from the man who had designed and patented the jet engine almost ten years before the war began! Praise indeed, he thought.
The bad language from the engine crew faded away as the officers got the casing off and started looking at the guts. “They use fir-tree roots to secure the turbine blades, sir,” Julian Peary said indignantly. “Pity you had so much trouble convincing the powers that be it was a good notion.”
“The Lizards have had this technology in place rather longer than we have, Wing Commander,” Hipple answered. Despite long thwarting by RAF indifference and even hostility, he showed no bitterness.
“And look,” Basil Roundbush said. “The blades have a slight twist to them. How long ago did you suggest that, sir? Two years? Three?”
Whatever Hipple’s answer was, Goldfarb didn’t hear it. He’d loosened enough screws himself to get off a panel of the radar’s case. He had a good notion of what he’d find inside: since physical laws had to be the same all through the universe, he figured the Lizard set would closely resemble the ones he was used to. Oh, it would be smaller and lighter and better engineered than RAF models, but still essentially similar. Valves, after all, remained valves-unless you went to the United States, where they turned into tubes.
But the second he got a good look at the radar, the flush of pride he’d felt a little while before evaporated. Hipple and his team could make some sense of what they saw inside the jet engine. The parts of the radar set remained a complete mystery to Goldfarb. The only thing of which he could be certain was that it had no valves… or even tubes.
What took their place was sheets of grayish-brown material with silvery lines etched onto them. Some had little lumpy things of various shapes and colors affixed. Form said nothing about function, at least not to Goldfarb.
Basil Roundbush chose that moment to inquire, “How goes it with you, David?”
“I’m afraid it doesn’t go at all.” Goldfarb knew he sounded like a bad translation from the French. He didn’t care: he’d found the simplest way to tell the truth.
“Pity,” Roundbush said. “Well, I don’t suppose we need every single answer this morning. One or two of them may possibly wait until tonight.”
Goldfarb’s answering laugh had a distinctly hollow ring.
Mutt Daniels drew the cloth patch through the barrel of his tommy gun. “You got to keep your weapon clean,” he told the men in his squad. Telling-even ordering-accomplished only so much. Leading by example worked better.
Kevin Donlan obediently started in on his rifle. He obeyed Daniels like a father (or maybe, Mutt thought uneasily, like a grandfather-he was old enough to be the kid’s grandfather, if he and his hypothetical child had started early). Other than that, though, he had a soldier’s ingrained suspicion of anyone of higher rank than his own-which in his case meant just about the whole Army. He asked, “Sarge, what are we doing in Mount Pulaski anyways?”