XI
A seat on one of the Clippers crossing the Atlantic these days went not by price but by favor, and you had to be very important. But few could be more so than a man who was making airplanes to help in the salvation of Britain, and when such a man said that his son was bringing him data which might be the means of improving the plane, the authorities had to take his word. Robbie’s London solicitor, Mr. Stafforth, said he would arrange it as soon as possible; and apparently he knew the ropes, for two days later the laconic gentleman called up to report that arrangements had been made for the following Friday.
Also there came a call from Rick, saying: “Our friend will call on Thursday afternoon.” So Lanny bade farewell to his family at Wickthorpe and went up to the huge sprawling city under the silvery barrage balloons. He always went to the Dorchester, because there, in the super-luxury lounge, he would find the sort of people whose talk was important to a P.A. “People with Munich faces,” Rick had called them; and sure enough, Lanny could have found a dozen in an hour who would say that we had already lost the war and what was the use of making so much fuss about it? People to whom the war meant nothing but personal inconvenience, and who meant to have as little of that as they could contrive!
Lanny lunched with an exquisitely corrupt youth whose father had got him exempted on grounds of his being indispensable to a banking business. Now with a pretty little doll who called herself a chorus lady but didn’t work at it, he outlined to the son of Budd-Erling—whom he imagined to be immensely wealthy—a scheme for making a fortune out of speculations in French electrical shares; they were down to a quarter of their value, and this tipster had information as to which concerns had made their deals with the Nazis and would stand to come out on top when peace had come—which would be before the leaves fell, his father was sure.
Expecting Alfy’s visit, Lanny went to the obscure hotel where he had met Rick. It was a cheap place and a drab room, but had the advantage that nobody knew you or concerned himself about what you were doing. Lanny was lying on the bed reading back copies of New York newspapers when the Royal Air Force man tapped on his door.
The Hon. Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, twenty-three, would become a baronet if he could manage to live long enough, which seemed far from likely at the moment. He had been Lanny’s friend since his nursery days, and was one of the few who shared the secret that Lanny was an enemy of the Fascists posing as their friend. Alfy knew that his father had got important information through this American, and he assumed that someone overseas must be doing the same. Four years ago he had been flying for the Spanish Republican government, and Lanny had been the means of helping him out of a Franco dungeon. For that he owed his life, and was ready to pay the debt if ever the opportunity came. Just now what Lanny asked was to learn all he could about the air war now coming to its climax around and above the coasts of Britain. So Alfy would set aside the rule of silence which his group had laid upon him.
He was a tall, slender fellow, with his mother’s fair hair and his father’s thin features and alert expression. He was very much of a “Red,” more so than either of the elders; he saw this war as a deliberate assault of the German cartels—steel, coal, power, and munitions—upon the labor movements of the rest of the world. Hitler was a puppet of these interests; they had bought him the guns, without which he would have remained a street-corner rabble-rouser. The end of the war “must be the overthrow of those giant exploiters, not merely in Germany but all over the world; otherwise it would be a “defeat in the victory,” as Lanny’s friend Herron had written after the last war—and what a prophet he had proved to be!
For the moment Alfy’s job was hunting the Hun, and he had been at it day and night. He was thinner and paler than ever before; obviously he was living on his nerves, and his friend would have liked first of all to buy him a square meal and then put him to bed. But no, he had only a few hours’ leave and they must talk “shop.” This was a war for survival, as Churchill had said; the balance was swinging one way and then the other, hour by hour, and the little push that you could give today might determine which way it would swing for keeps.
Alfy explained that the Hun flyers were trying to counter the British blockade. They had their bases close to the coast of France; indeed they had them all along the coast of Europe, from Narvik in Northern Norway all the way to the Spanish border. They were trying to establish command of the Channel and block off the British ports; they were coming in flights of five hundred at a time; bombing ships and shipping, docks and harbor installations, oil depots, and everything of military value. For the most part they came at night, because their daytime losses had been too heavy. But night bombing wasn’t accurate; and now the British had a wonderful new night-fighter with a device for seeing in the dark so ultra-secret that even Alfy didn’t know what it was. He revealed also that the British had constructed great numbers of imitation air bases to fool the Germans; they were so good that the Germans were dropping more bombs on them than on the real ones; so good that the British flyers had trouble in remembering not to land on them.
XII
Alfy talked about the new Budd-Erling known as the Typhoon. He spoke plainly; no use shirking the facts. It was good, but not good enough; nowhere near so good as the newest British fighter, the Submarine Spitfire, shortened to “Subspit.” Alfy went into technicalities, and Lanny made careful notes, for it was all right for him to have data on this subject, especially since he was leaving on the morrow. These new terrors had eight machine guns, four in each wing, and they made a terrific cone of fire; but forty caliber wouldn’t do, they had to be fifty. That added to the weight, of course; there was a tendency for the fighters to become heavier; more speed meant larger engines, and there was a call for armor over this vital part and that.
Like the century-old duel between gun and armor on battleships was the duel between safety and maneuverability on pursuit planes. Alfy pointed out that there was such a thing as having too much maneuverability; more than the human organism could make use of. If you turned at a speed of more than two hundred miles, you were pretty sure to black out, and you might not come to until you had hit the ground, or until the enemy had drilled you through. The Englishman drew an extraordinary picture of what it meant to be carrying on an air duel four or five miles above the ground, breathing from an oxygen tank, pursuing an enemy who was ducking and dodging at the terrific speeds these planes could now attain. The Hun was swerving; you almost had him in your sights, and if you could swerve a tiny fraction more you would have him; but there came, as it were, a yellowish-gray curtain before your eyes, the first warning of the blackout; you had to know exactly how far you could go toward unconsciousness, and you might have to make that decision a dozen times in the course of a prolonged duel of wits with your opponent—he facing exactly the same problem. If you straightened out, you would lose your man; also, you might discover another enemy plane on your tail, one who might get you in his sights.
This greatly dreaded blackout was caused by centrifugal force driving the blood from your head. There were ways to counter is partially; you contracted your abdomen, and held an extra amount of air in your lungs; that took a powerful man, which Alfy wasn’t. Leaning forward helped a little, because it lowered the head and made the task of the heart easier. The flyer said: “If it wasn’t for that yellowish-gray curtain, I could have got five times as many of the bastards.”
Lanny replied: “I will tell you something important. Robbie tells me that our scientists are working on the problem of a flying suit that will prevent the blackout. It will have inflatable rubber pockets over certain parts of the body that will restrict the flow of blood to the extremities and so tend to keep it in the head. The thing will be automatic; when the centrifugal force reaches a certain point, the clamps will be instantly applied. It won’t feel so comfortable, but it may enable you to get the enemy in your sights.”
“You can tell Robbie if he gets that, he can forget about armor and concentrate on m
aneuverability and firepower.”
“Don’t say anything about it, even to your superiors,” Lanny cautioned. “It’s a rather obvious idea, but the Nazis may not have hit on it. If we get it, you can be sure we’ll send it to Britain.”
XIII
When these two had last discussed the prospects of the air war, the baronet’s grandson had said: “Our men are better.” Now Lanny wanted to know how it was working out, and the answer was: “We are holding our own; and nobody could ask more, considering the handicaps. The Hun is on the offensive, and that means we are always outnumbered; sometimes we fight ten or twenty to one, and have to manage to survive until help arrives.”
The basic handicap was that of geography. The Germans had bases close to England, and could be dropping bombs on British cities a few minutes after they were discovered; but if the British wanted to bomb German cities they had to fly for an hour or two, exposed to flak all the way; the enemy had time to assemble great fleets of fighters—in short he had everything in his favor, both going and coming. “When one of our men catches a Hun by himself, the Hun ducks for the nearest cloud and has no shame about it. That tells the story of who is the better.”
Alfy talked about the men with whom he flew. They were a sober lot, far more so than those of the last war, by Rick’s account. They had put the future out of their minds; they lived in the moment and its dangers. They were saving England, or trying to, but they seldom talked about that; they talked about the enemy and his tricks, and the critical tenth of a second in which they had got him. Always something new to learn, some new formation, some device of teamwork. While resting, they read mystery stories, or talked about girls. Most of them were young, and the newcomers still younger.
The Royal Air Force had been a volunteer organization, and the pilots were mostly of the upper class. Alfy said: “I hate to admit it, but it’s the old school tie that is doing the job, because there’s nobody else. But that won’t be true for long; we’re having to take qualified men wherever we can find them now. And that’s all to the good; if we don’t break down England’s caste system, we’ll find this war was hardly worth fighting.”
Lanny agreed with all that; but he wanted to shake his head sadly when the flyer went on to say: “There will be a different England after this war. Our people will never be content with the old life, after the sacrifices they have made.” Lanny had heard exactly the same words from Alfy’s father during World War I, before this youngster had been born. However, there was no use saying anything to discourage a man who belonged to death.
“First we have to win,” Lanny said, a proposition beyond dispute. Alfy wanted to know what help could be expected from overseas, and how it was possible for the people there to be so blind to the meaning of Nazi victory for themselves. Were the “isolationists” in America the same as the “appeasers” in Britain, persons who thought more of their class than of their country?
“It’s not quite the same,” Lanny explained. “It’s what I call the peasant mind. The peasant is interested only in his own fields and doesn’t see beyond them, except, perhaps, for a small strip that he would like to add to his own. Americans have been safe behind their three thousand miles of ocean, and it’s hard indeed for them to realize that that ocean has dried up. A few men of vision understand the situation, and have to awaken the others. Fortunately Roosevelt is such a man.”
“Many of us over here think he’s the greatest statesman in the world, Lanny.”
“He is a lot better than the American people deserved, or would have accepted if they had known what they were getting.”
“Do you think they’ll re-elect him?”
“I’ll be able to judge better when I’m back there. I’ve been reading the New York papers.” Lanny picked up a copy of the Times. “You see this headline: ‘Willkie Says President Courts War.’ That seems to be the level on which the campaign is being conducted.”
They talked about American politics for a while, and Lanny explained as well as he could the curious practice by which the party out of power is compelled to attack the policies of the party in power, regardless of its own historic principles. So now the Republicans were the party of isolationism, even of pacifism, whereas for half a century they had been the party of imperialism; more fantastic yet, they were the party of states’ rights, which surely must make the body of Abraham Lincoln turn over in his Springfield tomb. “Anything to beat Roosevelt” was now the one Republican principle.
“Have you ever met him?” Alfy asked, and Lanny hated to lie outright to one whom he loved. “I have met him casually. He is one of the hardest-worked men in the world, I imagine. What we load onto him is enough to break the back of an elephant.”
XIV
They went out to dinner, in a small restaurant where nobody would know them. The great city was full of men in uniform, and no one paid special attention to an officer with wings on his sleeve. They talked about their two families, home news which would be of no interest to enemy ears; everyone was on the alert just then, because more than fifty empty parachutes had been found in various open places in England and Scotland—which meant that enemy spies had come down during the night. These spies would undoubtedly be English-looking and English-speaking men and perhaps women, so the newspapers warned; they would be saboteurs, equipped with explosives and incendiary materials; or they would carry suitcases containing radio transmitting sets, powerful enough to reach the French coast or submarines lying close to shore.
There came the scream of sirens. People had had a year to get used to them; some leaped up and ran for the nearest shelter, others sat quiet and finished their dinner; it was a matter of temperament. The sound of guns was heard in the distance, and then nearer; the ack-ack made quick sharp sounds like the barking of a dog but much faster; they spread all around, an all-pervading clatter. Then another sound, a dull boom, which people had agreed to describe by the word “crump.” Alfy, familiar with all sounds of war, exclaimed: “By Jove! They have broken through! The first time they have done it by daylight!” Lanny didn’t need to ask; he knew the sounds of bombs from many scenes of war.
They had finished their dinner; Lanny paid the bill and they strolled out with carefully preserved dignity to the street. There were people looking up; there were always people willing to risk their lives to see a show, and this was a free country. It was after sunset, but there was still enough light to see that the air was full of planes, high up, darting in every direction, for all the world like a swarm of midges in the springtime. Hundreds of them, perhaps a thousand, and you couldn’t tell which was which, you couldn’t pick out any particular “dogfight.” But now a great swarm of larger planes came sailing straight across, more slowly, out of a mass of cumulus clouds. You knew that these were the bombers; these were what the others were fighting about. They were so close together that it seemed to be a solid web. The bursts of firing mingled into a vast whirring, filling all the sky; and if this pair of diners gazing upward hadn’t been so afraid of showing the least sign of concern, they might have admitted that many millions of bullets being released in the sky had to come down somewhere on London streets and roofs.
“When you see a show like that,” remarked Alfy, “you have only one thought, you want to be up there.”
“You can’t do everything,” was his friend’s reply. “This is your day of rest.”
“This is damn serious,” replied the unresting airman. “If they can break through like this, it means we’re losing. It’s what they haven’t dared before.”
They went on discussing air-war strategy and statistics, until there came a terrific mechanical scream and then a deafening explosion, and a house about half a block away went up in a blast of flame and smoke and flying debris. The air compression hit them like a sort of universal blow, sparing no part of them, inside or out, and almost toppling them over. Showers of rubble fell about them, and it was at least a minute before they could speak, and longer before they could hear. Meantime
there came more explosions, near and far, behind and before them.
“Shall we go and help?” shouted Alfy; but Lanny caught him by the arm. “Leave it to the wardens, old man; you have your own job.”
XV
So they condescended to seek shelter. Near by was an entrance to the underground railway, to Englishmen “the tube.” They walked, rapidly but not running, to this goal. Many other people had been seized by the same idea and were not under the necessity of preserving their dignity; they got there first, and it was some time before the two gentlemen could crowd themselves in. The place was packed almost to suffocation, and the conditions were not pleasing to persons of refined sensibilities. There was public clamor for Government to “do something about it,” but Government had a lot of other things on their hands at the moment. It seemed more important to use steel for guns and ammunition than for the building of an underground city for seven million Londoners, to say nothing of the inhabitants of Portsmouth and Southampton and Sheffield and Birmingham and all the rest.
There were many, especially women and old people, who had taken up the tube as their dwelling place; they brought a pallet or a blanket to sleep on, they brought baskets of food, and refused to be driven out into the open. The sanitary arrangements were inadequate and the filth shocking. At first the police had tried to force people out, but as the danger increased and more homes were wrecked and people buried under them, the authorities had to give up and allow this subterranean way of life to become general. Was there going to develop an underground race of creatures, pale and spindling, unable to bear the sunlight, as predicted long ago in the stories of H. G. Wells? The son of Budd-Erling, squeezed like a sardine in a can and jarred to the marrow of his bones by blast after blast of the bombs, would have had to be superhuman if he had not thought with a certain amount of relief about a ticket for tomorrow’s Clipper reposing safely in a pocket over his heart!