The Lights of Skaro (23 page)

I sat up with a start. The sun had changed. Shadows were longer.

“What time is it? How long did I sleep?”

“I don’t know what time it is. You’ve been asleep for three or four hours.” She looked at me gravely. “Do you feel better for the sleep?”

“Much better.”

Our relationship hadn’t changed. We had been lovers for a moment. Now we weren’t lovers. We didn’t kiss, or touch each other, or exchange a word of affection. But she had made me into a man again. I couldn’t explain it any better than that if I tried for a hundred years. I turned over with my face to the gap in the wall and began once more to study the layout of the town.

By dark I had worked out a path to the parapet that guarded the edge of the bluff on the upstream side of the bridge. We both memorized the turns and twists of the narrow streets we would have to follow to reach it. I planned our way so that we would come out of cover into the prohibited zone at one end of the square where the smaller mosque stood. It would give us a clear run at the parapet, just above the point where I calculated the river current hit the bluff. We couldn’t see what lay below the bluff, but I knew from the strong boil of the current as it came out from under the bluff that it would have cut a good deep hole for diving, and while we would have to make the last dash in the open, fair marks for gunfire the moment we appeared, the square would allow us more room to dodge and zigzag than a narrow street. It was reasonable to assume that all the streets leading through the prohibited zone were enfiladed. I was certain of it when, before daylight had entirely gone, the lights came on.

Ordinarily you think – at least I think – of light as a symbol of good, blackness as the symbol of evil. The lights of Skaro were as evil as the fires of hell. Very little illumination showed in the sections of town farthest from the river, but along the river bank everything was lit up like a carnival. A searchlight from the minaret of the small mosque focused on the bridge, and floodlights illuminated every inch of the guarded river bank. The band of light, twenty-five yards wide, stretched like a bright ribbon strung between the horns of the circling town wall where the wall met the river, the illuminated swoop of the graceful bridge pointing into darkness from a point centered almost exactly between the horns, darkness everywhere beyond the wall and the band of light that completed its enclosure. Outside the wall men with guns and hunting dogs patrolled a no-man’s-land fivekilometers deep, searching for us. They did not have to look for us inside the wall. The lights were there to bar us. In their evil glare we faced the risk of a twenty-five-yard dash and a twenty-five-foot dive under fire. There was no turning back for us.

We went down into town from the graveyard just before the midnight curfew, as closely as we could calculate it with safety. The loudspeakers marked time only on the hour. Until the last dash, we walked hand in hand to give each other courage.

I will only say of our try for the river that it was perfectly planned and perfectly executed. Nothing ever went off better. We reached the edge of the prohibited zone without any trouble at all. I left my shoes and overalls there – Cora wore a bare minimum already, so she did not have to discard anything but her shoes – and we took off running from the last shadow, dodging and weaving across the brightly-lit square like a pair of hunted rabbits.

The guards must have roared with laughter to see us ducking bullets that were never fired. We reached the low parapet side by side and jumped unharmed and unpursued into the smooth boil of water at the base of the bluff, water that was deep solid green in the glare of the floodlights where it rolled out towards the safety of the middle of the river, bubbling greenish-white where it boiled gently beneath the sterns of the twin speedboats that waited hidden under the bulk of the bluff. Their motors were already quietly puttering, ready to explode into quick roars of power. It was the genius of Bulič’s mind that he was able to spot those speedboats within a few feet of where we would hit the water. Actually they weren’t even special precautions taken on our account, only a normal river patrol. But for us, particularly, they were both in the same spot, both with their motors running.

We weren’t immediately beaten up. When I tried to fight off the hands that reached to drag me out of the water I got a crack behind the ear that put me to sleep for a minute or two, and Cora was mussed as well as wet when I woke up in the boat with her. But they didn’t knock us around otherwise. I wondered about it until I learned that Bulič himself had come to Skaro to supervise our capture. Still dripping, we were taken to him by an escort of
rokos
who stood us up in front of the bar of justice like a pair of water-soaked scarecrows and then went away, leaving us alone with Nemesis.

The bar of justice was a plain wooden table in the small mosque near the bridge. Bulič had taken the mosque over as his headquarters. It is indicative of the changes he had in mind for the People’s Free Federal Republic that he had desecrated a building which the Party, under Yoreska, had been cautious not to violate. Cigarette butts were mashed into the rugs that carpeted the entire floor, ancient, lovely rugs which had not known even the touch of shoe-leather until then, only slippers and humble bare feet. A map, in itself another violation of the mosque, was tacked to the lattice-work of the screened loge where Moslem women had once prayed hidden from the eyes of men, and an army field telephone had been installed. The instrument stood on the table before which we waited for judgment, its wires snaking away across the floor to a hole knocked through the wall. Other heavier wires on the wall carried current for the naked droplight hanging over Bulič’s scarred head, and ran up through the roof to power the searchlight in the minaret.

The generator of the current was somewhere nearby. We heard its hum and the cough of the motor that drove it when, while we stood dripping on the rugs, the loudspeakers finished their final lullaby and signed off tor the night. It was midnight. The end of the day, the end of the trail, the end of the rope.

I wished I could have faced judgment with the dignity of more clothing than a pair of damp underpants.

Bulič gave us plenty of time to think about our dignity. He wore his usual black uniform, still without braid but now with a general officer’s insignia on the shoulders. He was reading and initialing a mass of papers. They couldn’t have been as important to him as we were, but he took a kind of pleasure in postponing a shift of his attention to us. When he had finished with the last paper he pushed the stack aside, lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair to look up at us. Smoke dribbled from his nostrils.

“So!” His tight lips curled back from the strong, ugly teeth in a grin of genuine enjoyment. “The determined Miss Lambert and the clever Mister Matthews, at long last. Can I assume by your clothing that you have joined the party of the People, Miss Lambert?”

She said nothing.

“It is a more attractive costume on you than the
yashmak
and pantaloons would have been. Where did you get it? Who helped you, after you got rid of the goats?”

She looked over his head.

“You will tell me in time.” His grin, or sneer, widened. “Your friend Danitza was equally close-mouthed when I asked her where she had left you. Only briefly, however. I did not have time to waste, and she was not a strong character.”

“Is she dead?”

“I should have said she
is
not a strong character.”

He looked at Cora expectantly, blowing smoke. He was waiting for her to ask the next question, so that he could supply the tasty details of Danitza’s subjugation to his will.

He talked to, or at, Cora almost exclusively. He hardly turned his head towards me. There was a sadism in his character that made him enjoy the domination of women more than the domination of men. He had shown it in his treatment of Madame Gorza, and in his hatred of Danitza that was not matched by a hatred of Yoreska. Whatever he did to me, he would do worse things to Cora when he got tired of playing with us.

Because I had come to think considerably more of Cora than things like truth, honor, and the respect of my fellow men, and had only those things left to trade with, I was more anxious than ever to find out what drove Bulič. If I could learn what he really wanted, what all his scheming was intended to accomplish, I might be able to help him accomplish it. The world would listen to me. I had a good reputation for truth-telling and hard-headedness. I could make a convincing public confession, if it would buy us anything. I could do a lot with the printed lie to offset the damage that Gorza and Djakovo and Radovič had done to the People’s Free Federal Republic — if there was a
quid pro quo,
and if Bulič wanted the damage repaired. I couldn’t try to bargain with him until I found out
why
he had done what he had done, possibly not even then. But I was still stubbornly convinced, in the face of all the evidence, that I was his mental superior. I could out-think him if I could first find out what made him tick. So, while he was still waiting for Cora to ask the next question about Danitza, I asked a question of my own.

“Why did you take such a roundabout way to free Dr. Gorza, General?”

His eyes flicked at me briefly.

“Still the curious reporter, Mister Matthews?” He dropped his cigarette on the rug and ground his boot heel on it. “I see no reason why I shouldn’t satisfy your curiosity. I arranged Gorza’s escape as I did because I wanted him to know that it was Bulič who set him free.”

“Why?”

“So he would talk about Bulič.”

“He didn’t.”

“I know. He didn’t believe what he saw with his own eyes. Neither did Anton Djakovo. But Radovič knew.” He slitted his eyes at Cora. “Didn’t he, Miss Lambert?”

“Yes.”

“He showed you the note?”

“Yes.”

“Is that it in your shirt pocket?”

She had put it there when she abandoned her shoes before our run for the parapet. Her water-soaked shirt was so nearly transparent that even the writing on the piece of paper was visible. She gave it to him when he held out his hand.

“Has anyone but you two seen it?”

“No…”

“You will both be required to confirm the truth of that later. In the meantime—”

He crumpled the note into a ball.

There was no question about what he meant. I said desperately, “Why did you want Yoreska to know that you had engineered the escapes?”

“So he would denounce me, of course.”

He leaned back in his chair, locking his hands behind his neck.

“It took longer than I expected,” he went on conversationally. “That was because Gorza and Djakovo failed to co-operate as I hoped they would. You were most obliging to bring my note back with you, Miss Lambert. I confess I expected you to publish it, rather than return with it. But the overall effect was as much as I could have expected. When Comrade Minister Yoreska was obliging enough to accuse Comrade Colonel Bulič publicly of treason—”

I won’t try to repeat it word for word. He rambled quite a bit. He enjoyed talking about his favorite subject, Bulič, and we were almost literally the only audience to whom he could safely unburden himself. Heinz, Léon, and Graham had been picked up the night of our escape, but his plans for them contemplated only prison, not a firing squad. They might repeat whatever he told them, even from prison. We could not repeat it. We were, for all practical purposes, already dead. He talked chummily with us.

He had an enormous megalomania, if the word can be used without implying that he was irrational. He was far from irrational. But he had begun to think of himself in the third person, somebody beyond mere individuality. The megalomania came out in his repeated use of ‘Bulič’ rather than ‘I’. Bulič had done this, and that, and the other. Always with great cleverness and at considerable personal risk. It had apparently never occurred to Bulič, first person, that anything could happen to Bulič, third person. Bulič, third person, was a man of destiny.

He had had his eye on the top spot in the Republic for years, naturally. He had been working his way up the ladder all his life. Yoreska knew his ambition, but Yoreska had the Army and the Party organization on his side. Bulič and his 
rokos
weren’t strong enough to challenge those. The only other instrument of power easily available to Bulič was Radovič, the tame mouthpiece.

It was Bulič’s job, at Yoreska’s orders, to break Radovič down so that he would say what he was told to say. Radovič was broken so effectively that he co-operated more thoroughly with Bulič than Yoreska expected. He not only spoke and read and recorded the hundreds of speeches which Yoreska wrote in support of Yoreska and the Party, but recorded as well other dozens of speeches which Bulič wrote to sabotage Yoreska and the Party program as soon as an opportunity arose to use them. The first and most important of these recordings was Radovič’s counter-denunciation of Yoreska, reading him off as a traitor and putting Bulič in his place.

Before there could be a counter-denunciation by Radovič, there had to be a denunciation of Bulič by Yoreska, preceded by a weakening of Yoreska’s position with the Party. Everything Bulič did was aimed at bringing about this combination of circumstances. Before he could use Radovič’s voice, he first had to take over the broadcasting system, by force. This he could not hope to do in normal circumstances. Yoreska had his spies planted in Bulič’s Security organization as Bulič had his own spies planted in Yoreska’s army organization, and Yoreska was always alert for suspicious plottings. There was only one way to take him off guard. He would have to be made to believe that Bulič was crushed, without power.

Bulič, to break Yoreska, invited Yoreska to break him. His first play was to get Gorza out of the country in a way which pointed to the connivance of Authority at high levels, and should have given rise at least to vague rumors that Bulič was mixed up in it somehow. He did not dare point the finger of suspicion too directly at himself. With a certainty of betrayal, Yoreska would simply have had him shot. He gambled his life on the delicate balance between suspicion and certainty in Yoreska’s mind.