The Lights of Skaro (3 page)

She did, wordlessly. I filled the skull-cap again, and a third time, and got her to try a fourth capful before she gagged. Afterwards I drank all I could hold of the warm, goaty, nauseous, sweat-and-felt-flavored milk, washed the taste out of my mouth with a drink from the runnel at the bottom of the ravine, stripped the remaining ewes’ udders dry, and was through for the day.

Cora had gathered enough grass to make a kind of pallet under the lip of a bank. She was lying on it, flat and exhausted. I sat down beside her. When she moved wearily to make room for me I said, “So there won’t be any misunderstandings, I’ll tell you ahead of time that I’m going to put my arms round you. I recommend that you do the same for me, inside my jacket. We won’t sleep much after the heat leaves the ground, but if we pool our body warmth we won’t freeze quite so fast. Do you mind?”

She said nothing.

Her body was rigid when I lay down and took her in my arms. She was small and slight, like a child, much slighter than I would have thought. To look at her, she was very womanly, with good breasts and the right kind of hips. It may have been her sure taste in clothes that made her seem more full-bodied than she was. She had a wonderful sense of proportion and value – about clothes.

She put her arms round me as I had suggested, inside my jacket. I felt her relax, very gradually. We were fairly comfortable, at first. Tired as we were, it didn’t take us long to go to sleep.

I don’t know how long we slept. Several hours, probably. I woke with a terrible biting ache of cold in my legs and arms. She was shivering violently. I did my best to rewrap myself round her, but we didn’t have enough calories left in us to do any good. Our sleep was finished for the night. I looked at the chill bright stars over our heads, then towards the east for some sign of a dawn that was still a long way off, and tried hard not to think about our troubles.

The small hours of the morning are a bad time to think about troubles. When you are too cold to sleep and too tired to wake up, your rational defenses are gone and you don’t have the substitute protection of unconsciousness. Your mind gets in a groove that spirals downward into gloom, despair and fear. My mind was pessimistic enough normally, even with its defenses up. Lying there in a semi-doze, freezing, unable either to sleep or to come fully awake, with a miserable, shivering girl cramping my arm where she lay on it, and the thought of Security spreading its nets for us, I began to picture all the things they would do to us if – when – they caught us. There was no habeas corpus in the Republic, or trial by jury, or a free press to shout about the rights of private citizens. Only the
rokos,
with their fists, boots, and bludgeons. I had seen the fists and the boots and the bludgeons swing on others, heard bones crunch and flesh split. The pictures were in my mind, ready to come to life with Cora and me in the middle of them. Vividly, with the reality of dreams and the continuity of conscious thought, I learned that night what a coward a man can be in his own mind.

In the middle of all this, it occurred to me that Cora was probably going through the same thing. Although we were physically chilled, the cold was not enough to justify the tremors that went over her body like waves. She was only half asleep, as I knew by the irregular movements of her eyelashes against my neck, and her imagination was as good as mine, her defenses no better. She wouldn’t confess to fear or weakness, ever. But the realization that she was probably having her own nightmares helped me to escape mine.

I said, “Cora.”

She started violently awake, all her body tense for a moment, then relaxing again.

“Y-es?” Her teeth clicked.

“Would you like to split a cigarette? We have two. I’ve been saving them.”

“Y-yes. Please.”

I freed my arm to get the cigarette and a match out of my pocket. Her lips were blue in the brief flare of the match, her pupils wide and frightened, her mouth slack. I had been right about the nightmares.

I had my own face in shape for the match light. I took a lungful of smoke, then gave her the cigarette and watched the spark of it glow and tremble in her lips as she inhaled.

I said, “I’ve been thinking about Dr. Gorza and his wife. It kind of helps to remember that they got away. When you start thinking about other things, I mean.”

The cigarette spark glowed again, less jerkily. She was waking up, restoring her defenses.

“I tried to do a story on it, human-interest stuff. It wouldn’t come off. But Madame Gorza was one of the most remarkable women I ever met. She was the strong one of that pair. Without her, he never would have made it.”

“Thanks.”

She handed me the cigarette at the same time she said it, so I wasn’t sure whether she had thanked me for a couple of puffs of smoke, or a compliment to her sex, or what she saw I was trying to do for her morale. I didn’t care. I was helping my own morale at the same time. Talking about a man and a woman who had escaped the
rokos,
worked their way through danger and guards and closed borders, to freedom, was as warming as a blanket. They had had help, and we had none. But their help had come to them unexpectedly when they needed it most, without their asking for it. As it might come to us. I didn’t expect it ever would. But I went on talking about their good luck just the same, dragging the story out and inventing details I didn’t know, to talk the night and our nightmares away.

The escape made a front-page splash in the United States as well as in Western Europe. It happened several months after the big switch in the external Party line, from Hate Everybody to Sweet Reasonableness with Co-existent Capitalism. The reasons for the switch are something history will decide, but what Gorza had to say about conditions in the People’s Free Federal Republic after he was safely out of it had a lot to do with the establishment of a Western policy of watchful wait-and-see. People listened to him because he was Sigmund Gorza. Other refugees had got out of the Republic before, hundreds of them. But they were mostly dispossessed middle-class shopkeepers, or men and women too old to work, or jailbirds, people the Republic didn’t want and were willing to let the West feed. No real attempt was made to keep them from filtering out through the Curtain, although now and then several would be caught and jailed, and as an example, a few shot. Men like Dr. Gorza were guarded night and day, and never allowed within twenty miles of a border in any circumstances.

He was an Austrian professor, a specialist in agronomy and food synthesis, one of the greatest living authorities in his field, more valuable to the Republic’s backward, opposition-riddled agrarian economy than ten thousand acres of growing wheat, and as great a loss when he got away from them. Ed Cleary, of Allied Press, was the first reporter to talk to him and Madame Gorza after they were out. Ed had the good luck to be in Istanbul when they got that far. He scored a clean beat over all the competition, including me. I was covering for American Newspaper Alliance, on a temporary assignment that took me to Ankara when I should have been in Istanbul.

I talked to the Gorzas afterwards. Not to match Ed’s story, which I couldn’t do, but because I had an idea for a story of my own with a different angle. The woman’s angle, in this case. I by-passed Gorza to talk to his wife about how a woman feels with her life and her husband’s life thrust into her hands.

They didn’t even know they were escaping until the last minute. They had been trapped in the Republic for six years, ever since the Party took power after the war. Gorza had had a research contract with the Liberal Government that preceded the Party. When the Party took control they took over Gorza, his laboratory and the contract as well.

Madame Gorza said, “At first they promised us that we would be free to go when the contract ran out.” She was a thin, grey woman with a deeply-lined face. She kept her hands folded in her lap while she talked. Sometimes they twisted at each other or at the handkerchief she held. “They gave Sigmund everything he needed for his experiments, and a house, and a car. Very few people had an entire house to themselves, even a small one like ours, and almost nobody except very important officials had a car. We were well treated. But there were Security police with us always, night and day. We were never allowed to travel more than fortykilometers from the capital. I knew, long before Sigmund did, that they had no intention of letting us go, ever.”

When the contract expired, Gorza found out what they were really up against. His application for return of their passport and an exit visa was answered by a statement that the passport had expired and was invalid. An application for a
laissez-passer
to leave the country was ignored. Another application, for repatriation under the U.N. covenant, was rejected on a technicality. Gorza kept on filing more applications, desperate for some key that would unlock the door. He was an old man, a scholar, not a man of action. The thought of trying to get away without proper papers never occurred to him. With Security close at his coat-tails twenty-four hours a day, and his wife as a further encumbrance, he was helpless.

“Then, without warning, we received the
laissez-passer
,” Madame Gorza said in her thin, gentle Viennese voice. “It was in the letter-box when we got up one morning. We thought it strange, but they did things like that, without explanation. So that we would never understand, and would feel helpless against them.” Her hands twisted in her lap. “We didn’t understand. But there was the paper, and our guards had been withdrawn. For the first time in six years, you see. It is hard for me to explain just how we felt, how unbelievable it all seemed, how distrustful we were of a trick, and at the same time hopeful, afraid to believe what we wanted to believe—”

“I can understand,” I said. “What did the
laissez-passer
say, exactly?”

“I don’t remember the wording, but it gave us twelve hours to leave the country, by way of Sjolnič. It—“

“Only twelve hours?”

“Yes. I couldn’t forget that. It was very curt, more like an order to get out than a permission. It was on the letterhead of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Minister himself had signed it, or so we believed. We had reason to know his signature well.” She added simply, ‘So we went to Sjolnič.”

There was much more to it than that. Private citizens do not move freely on the roads behind the Curtain, and private citizens driving a car are unheard of. She told me that they were stopped and questioned so many times that they lost count. Each stop was a hell of a suspense, another delay that might end with their being sent back, or held beyond the twelve-hour deadline. They had not wasted a minute, stopping only to pack a couple of suitcases and run – they had no friends to whom they chose to say goodbye – but it took more than ten hours of agonizing progress from check point to check point, with the
laissez-passer
to be read, questioned and grudgingly returned at each stop, before they got to the border station beyond Sjolnič, less than two hundred miles from the capital and just under three miles from freedom.

On the map, Sjolnič appears to be at the frontier. The village is actually a dozen miles behind it, the border post nine or ten miles past the village in a little wooded valley, so that there was a no-man’s land beyond the post that could be regarded as the thickness of the Curtain. The road they were on was the only permissible way to pass through it in that area. Anyone caught off the road in the quarantined zone was either shot or arrested on sight, depending on how the roving zone patrols felt about it. The road itself was blocked, according to Madame Gorza’s description, by what must have been an old tank-trap, concrete pillars set into the roadbed between a jut of hillside and the bank of a creek. When the time came, she had to take the car carefully through the trap in low gear, cramping the wheels back and forth to get between the pillars. She did all the driving – Gorza had never learned to handle anything more complicated than a test-tube – and from what she had to say about the road it hadn’t seen any traffic for a long time, which is to be expected of a tank-trapped, nearly abandoned back-country highway leading from a tightly-controlled police state to another country with which the police state has only bare formal relations and no trade.

They saw neither vehicle nor pedestrian on the road between the village and the border post. The three guards at the post seemed almost glad to welcome them as a break in the monotony. At first.

“They asked for our passport,” Madame Gorza said. Her thin voice was even thinner than before, and her hands twisted more often. “Sigmund showed them the
laissez-passer.
It was not enough. The man in charge did not question the Minister’s signature or the paper itself, but his regulations were strict. He read them to us, much more angrily than was necessary – he was furious at us – I don’t really know why—”

“You were forcing him to make a decision of his own. Decisions are dangerous.”

“I suppose that was it. The regulations said no one could pass the frontier in any circumstances without a passport and an exit visa, and the
laissez-passer
said we could. He didn’t know what to do. He roared at us for minutes, I think to try to make us go back without ordering us back. Finally he went into his post to telephone for instructions.

“The telephone wouldn’t work.” She touched her mouth with the handkerchief, in a gesture that might have been to hide some twist of her lips. “It was then I knew – I
knew,
with complete conviction – that the whole thing was a trick, some kind of a trap to torture us. The guard sent one of the other men off on a motor cycle with the
laissez-passer,
telling him to take it to the village and bring it back endorsed by somebody in authority. I knew it was hopeless. No one was ever going to endorse it, until it was too late and our twelve hours were gone. Then it would be our fault for having delayed beyond the deadline, and because we had failed to accept the opportunity they had given us—”

She broke off, shutting her eyes to check the tears that were coming at the memory of that moment. “I could see it all. Sigmund, poor dear, saw nothing. He was talking happily about Austria, and the friends we would see when we got there, and the
schlagobers
of Vienna –
schlagobers,
of all things—”