The terms of the truce forbade either side from moving troops forward. Mutt had every intention of abiding by that: if you broke the terms of an agreement, you’d have-and you’d deserve to have-a devil of a time getting another one. All the same, he carefully noted the hiding places from which the Lizards came. If Wuppah wasn’t doing the same with the Americans, he was dumber than Mutt figured.

Here and there, Lizards and Americans who came across one another in their searches cautiously fraternized. Some officers would have stopped it Mutt had grown up listening to his grandfathers’ stories of swapping tobacco for coffee during the War Between the States. He kept an eye on things, but didn’t speak up.

He was anything but surprised to see Dracula Szabo head-to-head with a couple of Lizards. Dracula was grinning as he came back to the American lines. “What you got?” Mutt asked.

“Don’t quite know, Lieutenant,” Szabo answered, “but the brass is always after us to bring in Lizard gadgets, and the scaly boys, they traded me some.”

He showed them to Mutt, who didn’t know what they were good for, either. But maybe some of the boys with the thick glasses would, or could find out. “What did you give for ’em?”

Dracula’s smile was somewhere between mysterious and predatory. “Ginger snaps.”

A blast of chatter greeted David Goldfarb when he walked into A Friend In Need. The air in the pub was thick with smoke. The only trouble was, it all came from the fireplace, not from cigarettes and pipes. Goldfarb couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a smoke.

He worked his way toward the bar. A Friend In Need was full of dark blue RAF uniforms, most of them with officers’ braid on the cuffs of their jacket sleeves. Just a radarman himself, Goldfarb had to be circumspect in his quest for bitter.

If it hadn’t been for the RAF uniforms, A Friend In Need couldn’t have stayed in business. Bruntingthorpe was a tiny village a few miles south of Leicester a greengrocer’s shop, a chemist’s, a few houses, the pub, and damn little else. But the RAF experimental station just outside the place brought hundreds of thirsty men almost to the door of A Friend In Need. The place not only survived, it flourished.

“Goldfarb!” somebody bawled in a loud, beery voice.

The radarman’s head whipped around. There at a table, waving enthusiastically, sat Flight Officer Basil Roundbush, who, along with Goldfarb, was part of Group Captain Fred Hipple’s team that labored to incorporate Lizard knowledge into British jet engines and radars. Goldfarb often thought that was the equivalent of trying to incorporate the technology of smokeless powder into the Duke of Wellington’s infantry squares, but carried on regardless.

Roundbush, by some miracle, had an empty chair next to him. Goldfarb made for it with mixed feelings. On the one hand, sitting down would be nice. On the other, if he sat next to the flight lieutenant, not a barmaid in the world, let alone the ones in Bruntingthorpe, would look at him. Besides being an officer, Roundbush was tall and blond and ruddy and handsome, with a soup-strainer mustache, a winning attitude, and a chestful of medals.

Goldfarb had a Military Medal himself, but it didn’t match up. Nor did he: other rank, medium-sized, lean, with the features and dark, curly hair of an Eastern European Jew. Sitting down next to Roundbush reminded him of how un-English he looked. His parents had got out of Poland a little before the First World War. A lot of people hadn’t been so lucky. He knew that very well.

“Stella, darling!” Roundbush called, waving. Because it was he, the barmaid came right away, with a broad smile on her face. “Pint of best bitter for my friend here, and another for me as well.”

“Right y’are, dearie,” Stella said, and swayed away.

Roundbush stared after her. “By God, I’d like to take a bite out of that arse,” he declared. His upper-class accent made the sentiment sound a trifle odd, but no less sincere for that.

“As a matter of fact, so would I,” Goldfarb said. He sighed. He didn’t have very much chance of that, not just with Roundbush next to him but with the pub-with the whole experimental station-full of officers.

Stella came back with the tall glasses of beer. Roundbush banged his teeth together. If Goldfarb had done that, he’d have got his face slapped. For the mustachioed fighter pilot, Stella giggled.Where is justice? Goldfarb wondered, a thought that would have been more Talmudic had it been directed to something other than trying to end up in bed with a barmaid.

Basil Roundbush raised his glass on high. Goldfarb dutifully followed suit. Instead of proposing a toast to Stella’s hindquarters, as the radarman had expected, Roundbush said, “To the Meteor!” and drank.

“To the Meteor!” Goldfarb drank, too. When you got right down to it, a jet fighter was more toastworthy than a barmaid’s backside, and less likely to cause fights, too.

“On account of the Meteor, we’re going to be good chaps and pedal on back to barracks at closing time,” Roundbush said. “We’re going up tomorrow afternoon, and the powers that be take a dim view of improving one’s outlook, even with such camel piss as this allegedly best bitter, within twelve hours of a flight.”

The thin, sour beer did leave a good deal to be desired, even by wartime standards. Goldfarb was about to agree to that, with the usual profane embellishments, when he really heard what the flight officer had said. “We’regoing up?” he said. “They’ve installed a radar in a Meteor at last, then?”

“That they have,” Roundbush said. “It will give us rather better odds against the Lizards, wouldn’t you say?”

He spoke lightly. He’d flown a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain when a fighter pilot’s life expectancy was commonly measured in days. But a Spitfire had had an even chance against a Messerschmitt Bf-109. Against Lizard aircraft, you had to be lucky just to come back from a combat mission. Actually shooting the enemy down was about as likely as winning the Irish Sweepstakes.

“D’you think we’ll actually be able to accomplish something against them now?” Goldfarb asked.

“We add the radar, which is your wicket, and we add a good deal of speed, which is always an asset,” Roundbush said. “Put them together and I’d say they improve our chances all the way up to bloody poor.”

As a joke, that wouldn’t have been bad. The trouble was, Roundbush wasn’t joking. Goldfarb had tracked Lizard aircraft on ground-based radar down at Dover before the aliens openly revealed their presence. They’d gone so high and fast, he and everybody else had wondered if they were real or defects in the mechanism. He and everybody else knew the answer to that now.

Roundbush said, “You’ve flown airborne radar before, haven’t you? Yes, of course you have; that’s why Group Captain Hipple wanted you as part of the group. Don’t mind me. I’m a silly ass tonight.”

“That’s right.” Goldfarb hoped the pilot would realize he was agreeing about his experience, not the later parenthetical comment. He’d been in charge of a set flown in a Lancaster to see if the thing could be done. “Rather more room to fit the set in a bomber fuselage than in the Meteor.”

“Rather,” Roundbush said, and drained his glass.

Goldfarb finished his bitter, too, then held up a hand to buy a round in turn. That was inviolable pub custom: two men together, two rounds; four men together, four rounds; eight men together and they’d all go home half blind.

Stella took her time about noticing a mere radarman, but Goldfarb’s half-a-crown spent as well as anyone else’s. When she went off to get change, though, she didn’t put as much into her walk for him as she had for Roundbush.

The pilot said, “We’d be better off still if we had guided rockets like the Lizards’. Then we’d knock their planes out of the sky at twenty miles, as they can with us. Once we’re inside gun range, we have an almost decent chance, but getting there, as the saying goes, is half the fun.”