The Lights of Skaro (24 page)

The balance didn’t swing far enough in his direction after the Gorza escape. Nobody mentioned Bulič’s name except Madame Gorza, when she was talking to me, and neither she nor I believed he was involved. The rumor died stillborn. All the escape accomplished was to throw a wrench into the Party’s peaceful co-existence program, which wasBulič’s secondary objective.

Djakovo came next. Getting him out to where he could speak and be heard by the rest of the world hurt the Partyprogram and Yoreska’s leadership even more seriously than Gorza had done, but the rumor still wouldn’t come to life. Djakovo didn’t believe what he saw when his rescuer pushed his face into the light of the firebox, bared his teeth and said, “Look at me! Who am I?” Djakovo wouldn’t repeat the name even when Oliver suggested it. Yoreska was tottering, ready for attack, but the pointing finger of suspicion would not make its delicate, just-so-and-not-too-much shift in Bulič’s direction.

He took a longer chance with Radovič. He had to nudge the stubborn pointer. The note in his handwriting would have condemned him beyond escape if Yoreska had seen it. On the other hand, a mention of it in the foreign press, even a facsimile reproduction, could be challenged as imperialistic double-dealing but should produce just the result he hoped for, his denunciation and dismissal from office on suspicion.

I honestly believe he got a thrill out of staking his life to win the power he wanted. It must have been a terrific shock to him to hear that Cora was making her foolhardy return to the Republic, an even greater shock when he learned that Yoreska himself had gone to the airfield to meet and question her. If she had shown Yoreska the note, Bulič would have been a dead man the moment he walked uninvited into Yoreska’s office. Yet he came in as boldly as a lion, and left like the conqueror he was after tricking Yoreska into his own downfall and death. If intelligence, courage, and determination are admirable qualities in themselves, Bulič was a great man.

I was ready to concede it long before he finished telling us how clever he had been. It was about two o’clock in the morning when he stopped talking, and I wasn’t in a hopeful state of mind. I didn’t see that we had anything to trade with. Our only real danger to him was while we were free and in possession of his note. That, properly exploited, could have been used to turn the Party organization against him before he consolidated his position. We could not ourselves have exploited it, but it was a latent threat he had to take care of. And two Americans, the self-confessed spies and saboteurs that he indicated quite clearly we would be before he had us shot, would serve his purposes wonderfully. He didn’t need us to repair the damage he had done to peaceful co-existence. He didn’t want peaceful co-existence. He intended to conquer the world. He, Bulič, third person, with his
rokos
and his army and his sixteen million slaves, intended to overrun and rule Western Europe as a base for a further spread of his power to the Americas. Not Party power, or the dominance of the People’s Free Federal Republic over other countries, but his own personal power. He was absolutely convinced of his destiny to lead and dominate.

No sane man can out-think a mind like that. It’s beyond the reach of normal thought. There is only one effective way to get at it.

Cora recognized these facts before I did.

She was quite a woman, Cora. It took me a long time to realize just what a woman she was, and see that all the time I had been thinking and planning and scheming and kidding myself how bright and level-headed and sensible I was, it was she, not I, who supplied the drive to keep us going; by bending her ego to mine when our egos clashed; by bolstering my strength with her own apparent weakness; by driving me to lead when she saw I would not follow; by forcing me to decision when decision was necessary and discussion useless; by bribing me back to manhood, when I was ready to give up, with all she had to offer, herself. That was Cora Lambert. It doesn’t matter that she did it all with calculation, to accomplish certain results, as she used her charm to milk information out of hotel bell-hops. I knock my head on the ground to her here and now for the way she made use of the weapons that came to hand. At the time, I didn’t realize what her last and only weapon was, or it wouldn’t have been effective.

She said calmly, ‘How did you know we would try to escape through Skaro, General?”

“It was simple enough.” Bulič stretched and yawned, not because he was bored. He was still talking about his favoritesubject. “I assumed logically that the clever Mister Matthews, a stubborn man with inflated ideas of his own capabilities, would insist on taking charge. After that, it was simply a matter of reasoning a step ahead of him. I might have had more difficulty had you planned the escape, Miss Lambert.”

“You flatter me.”

She smiled at him, by God. I swear I could see the charm turn on like a light. It gave me a cold sickness in the stomach. Feminine charm, to a man like that, was the smell of blood to a lion, something to whet an animal appetite for more blood and the crunch of breaking bones. I thought furiously:
Don’t do it! Don’t let him see you as a woman, Cora!

She did it. With all the tricks she knew, she thrust her femininity at him. The femininity was pretty obvious anyway, in the skimpy wet shirt and shorts that were her only clothing, but she made it even more obvious with a barely perceptible thrust of her breasts, a slight graceful bend of the knee, an almost imperceptible turn of the body now and then. While he recited our escape, step by step, and the counter-steps he had taken to block us, she held his eyes and his increasingly sharp attention with her body and smile and rapt interest in what he was saying.

“I learned from Danitza where she had left you.” He grinned wolfishly, watching her breathe. “You could only move towards the west. I could not be personally everywhere in the field, so it was more than a day before I learned of the fire in the cornfield. I investigated the obvious diversion immediately, and learned of the goats and the stolen clothing.”

“We didn’t expect you to hear about them so soon.” There was frank admiration in Cora’s voice. “We underestimated you.”

“On the contrary. I overestimated the clever Mister Matthews. I credited him with rudimentary caution. Mister Matthews would realize that the goats and the
yashmak
would protect you for a limited time only. There would have to be a quick change of disguise to something wholly dissimilar. The Party uniform occurred to me at once, although I did not see how you could hope to move as far as you did with it. But I expected you to shift to it before you did. I was surprised to be able to trace you, as peasants, to the village where you sold a goat and bought supplies. After that I looked for you both as peasants and as Party members. How did you slip by me?”

“We had help.”

I shouted
No!
in my mind, more furiously than before. She was selling out. She was offering him not only herself, with a twist of hips and jut of breasts, but Piotr as well, the girls, the mustached farmer who had played the balalaika for us, his two lanky kids, and his wife who had fed us. All for nothing. Bulič could have them all anyway, when and as he chose to put the thumbscrews on us. There was nothing she could buy with a voluntary betrayal except the shame that I felt for her, and for myself because the bait she was flirting so cheaply, and vainly, in front of Bulič I had thought neither cheap nor vain when she snared me with it and pulled me back from cowardice. I never believed until then that a man actually grinds his teeth in fury, but I ground mine until my jaws hurt; in fury, shame, and despair. Cora had given up.

Bulič’s lips stretched in their wolfish grin. He saw what she was trying to do. A spark of new pleasure began tosmolder in his black animal eyes.

“
Of course you had help, or you would not have come this far. It is the identity of your helpers that interests me. After you have been induced” – he lingered over the word, tasting it — “to supply me with their names, I will take care of them. It was not necessary for me to identify them sooner because I knew that the clever Mister Matthews would inevitably lead you to Skaro. I had only to—”

“Inevitably?”

I could barely get the word past the ugliness that was rising in my throat. It must have sounded like a croak. But he didn’t even look in my direction. He answered me with his eyes still nailed to Cora’s body.

“Inevitably. It was the way your mind would work. You reasoned, “Bulič will block the border and double frontier patrols, expecting us to try to creep through the blockade. We must therefore avoid the blockade and remain on the roads. Since we cannot by any stretch of good luck hope to approach within three kilometers of the border by road except at Skaro, Skaro it must be.” I analyzed all your cunning, Mister Matthews. You thought, “Only a reckless fool could be expected to make an attempt through Skaro. Bulič knows I am not a reckless fool. I will deceive him.” But Bulič reasoned a step ahead of you; right up to the bridge that was impassable night or day, and the river current skirting the bluff as it does, and the parapet over deep water. Did you not notice how few
rokos
were in sight in Skaro, only Army guards? Did a simple trick like that convince you that Bulič would not watch the obvious bolt-hole, Mister Matthews? Did you wonder why you were not shot at as you ran so nimbly across the square? Did you really expect that I would not be waiting for you in the river, with spread hands to catch two ripe apples fallen from a tree? Clever, clever Mister Matthews! And lovely, lovely Miss Lambert!”

He put his head back and roared in full-throated laughter. It was the first, last, and only time I ever heard him laugh.

I mugged him. While his head was back and the tendons of his bull neck stretched in the shouting enjoyment of final victory, I jumped around the end of the table and dropped my arm across his throat, taking the wrist of my right arm in my left hand to complete the lock and hauling him backward into his chair, off balance. He reacted fast, reaching for my fingers to break them, but I bit deep into the flesh of his big paw through the pad of his thumb, locking my teeth behind the thumb joint, holding him with a bulldog bite while he clawed at me more frantically and less strongly with the other hand, unable to use it with strength because of our positions as I bore down more tightly on his windpipe and bit always deeper into his palm, tasting the salt of his blood, strangling him until his movements lost the will behind them and became aimless convulsive jerks and kicks in the vice I held him by. In shame, rage, humiliation, and hatred, I thought at him what I couldn’t say with my teeth locked in his flesh:
You outfigured me, outguessed me, outreasoned me! You showed me up for a fool and a fumbler. You're a cleverer man than I'll ever be, Built.
I concede it. Now reason your way out of this.

I tightened the lock.

He was hardly twitching by then. There were only tremors left in his legs, no conscious control behind his movements, but I gave him a last extra few seconds without oxygen before I spat out his bloody, gnawed hand and let him roll out of his chair on to the rug. He dropped like a sack.

Cora said breathlessly, “You’ve killed him!”

“No such luck. He’ll come out of it in a few minutes. Help me look around for something to tie him with.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Make a break, of course. Unless you’d rather stay and bathe his forehead.”

At that moment I hated her as much as I hated him. I’m glad she didn’t say anything in answer to the taunt.

I ripped the field telephone loose and used its wire to tie him. While I wrapped the flex around his wrists and ankles, I sent Cora to drop the bar across the door, just in case. The guards outside would not ordinarily enter without being called, but there was no need to take a chance or overlook a precaution. For that same reason I took a thick handful ofBulič’s papers for insulation, jumped up on the table and yanked the dropcord loose. It pulled away with a quick sputter of sparks and a momentary change in the hum of the generator.

Afterwards the only light in the mosque came through regularly-spaced small windows high up in the wall, under the dome. They were put there so that worshippers in the privacy of the mosque could not be seen from outside by unbelievers, and Allah’s light would fall from above on the Faithful. It was Bulič’s light, not Allah’s, which came through the windows now, but there was enough high-powered glare outside to send pale beams of illumination into the mosque. These were parallel bars like buttresses slanting down across my way as I dragged Bulič’s heavy, slack body across the rugs towards the women’s loge; light, dark, light, dark, light, dark, light falling on me and the unconscious man I tugged along with a loop of dropcord under his arms, as if we moved in the flashes of a stroboscope.

The last beam showed me a small door leading into the loge. I pulled Bulič through it, into shadow. Kneeling there in the dark, working by touch, I used the dropcord to truss him beyond chance of working free.

Through the lattice of the loge Cora whispered, “What are you doing?”

“Tying him so he can’t roll around and kick up a rumpus when he comes to. The longer it takes them to find him, the better chance we have.”

“Have you gagged him?”

“It isn’t necessary after what I did to his throat.”

“But—”

“Stop yammering at me! I know what I’m doing.”

She shut up. I finished with Bulič, then came out of the loge and made a few quick final preparations while we still had light to see by.

The sputter of the short when I pulled the dropcord loose had suggested a scheme by which we could succeed in getting ourselves shot, quickly and decently. It was all I hoped for. If Bulič’s
rokos
never put their paws on us alive, we were ahead of the game. I didn’t tell Cora that, or anything. I kept her from asking questions by setting her to find a rug small enough to carry while I turned the table over and levered a leg off.

It was a fairly heavy table. The leg took some pulling to tear loose, but it made a good club, about the size and heft of a baseball bat. With that in hand, and the small rug rolled for carrying, I explained the plan of escape as I wanted her to believe it.