The Lights of Skaro (26 page)

It went well, at the beginning. I found it easy to hit the capital I’s. Bulič had nothing on me. I did this, I did that, I consistently outfoxed the opposition. I saw that such and such was about to happen, with remarkable foresight, and took proper steps to circumvent it in such a way that I always landed on my feet. I was really clever, in retrospect, and when the chips were down I strong-armed my way out like a hero. To slug your way through thirty-two thousand thugs and an army while dragging a helpless female along practically by the hair is no small feat, as anyone would realize as soon as my story hit the presses. I drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and enjoyed myself pounding the “I’ key.

The thrill didn’t last. The key grew progressively less useful. Thinking about your own story, even telling it orally in reasonable good faith, is not the same as putting it down in cold black and white. It’s like being under oath, with every word permanently recorded and your sworn signature attached. Before you write it, you think:
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Is this the way it really happened? Am I telling it as a neutral observer would have seen it?

Trying to be neutral, I found Cora creeping into my story with increasing frequency; not as a helpless female dragged along by the hair, the way I wanted her to appear, but as a mind and will and driving force. I began to see, first with irritation and then with what amounted to shock, how much she had done to guide, push, pull, cajole, trick, and fight us all that long hard road to the mudbank. I don’t mean that I wrote myself down, either. She could never possibly have made it without me. But more and more I saw myself as the horse, not the driver, with a bodiless bit in my mouth and a cool, calculating hand on the reins. It wasn’t my story I was writing. It was Cora’s.

I damned all neutral observations and tore up what I had written. Objective writing is not the only means for telling a story. Interpretative journalism or constructive reporting or plain out-and-out news slanting, whatever anyone wants to call it, was a field in which I had had plenty of experience. I set out to slant Cora right out of the picture.

It still wouldn’t come off. I could write fiction round her, but I couldn’t write history. And history was what I was working with. I wrote, tore up, rewrote and tore up again for hours, all through a terrible afternoon and into the dark of evening, without producing a page in which I shone as I wanted to shine. The end of the story was my own, certainly. I clung to that knowledge to keep me going. But I couldn’t get
to
the end without Cora’s help. I looked pretty strong in the beginning, when I was dragging her bodily away from Danitza, or forcing her to humble herself behind the
yashmak,
or making her take off her shoes to let me bandage her heels. In those pages I was the dominant male, will against will and mine winning over hers because I was physically her superior. If I disliked her, how she must have detested me for my threat of force to have my way. What bitter pills she must have swallowed in bending to those threats, taking flat orders without question or discussion, meekly following where I led as long as I led with confidence, then using her charm, intelligence, understanding of character, and finally her ultimate coin not to oppose my will but to bolster it when it faltered, direct me when I had lost direction, strengthen me when I weakened, and when I was about to throw our lives away in sheer crazy senselessness, bring me out of it with cool sanity and save us. Both of us. She could have pulled loose from me at any time on the bridge and jumped. Instead, she had tugged me away from the waiting gun muzzles at the risk of her own life. It had been she who boosted me to the parapet and into the safety of the river, not I who boosted her. Without her, I would have died.

I was down to spiritual bedrock by the time I got that far. I looked naked truths in the eye, not liking what I saw and with a bad taste in my mouth, but beyond the point where I could deceive myself. I knew why I had come to hate her, why my growing admiration and attraction and affection for her had curdled. She had offered herself, who had been mine, to Bulič in a vain and useless attempt to buy our lives, and I couldn’t take it at that price. It was the one and only thing that could have driven me voluntarily to elect death instead. Honor, reputation, patriotism, the power of my by-line – I had been willing enough to sell those for whatever they would bring. I couldn’t sell Cora Lambert, or let her sell herself. With this stunning realization in my mind, an awful question followed: Had she known it? Had the provocation which sent me at Bulič’s throat been deliberate, to goad me into desperate action, not a betrayal but another weapon in her bag of tricks? Had she played me off against Bulič, water against fire to produce steam and an explosion instead of wet ashes and failure?

It was black night when I ran from my room to look for her.

She wasn’t in her quarters when I learned where they were. The typewriter, coffee-pot, and cigarettes were there. A blank piece of paper was in the typewriter, without a mark on it. Half a dozen cigarette butts had been stubbed out in an ashtray. A cold cup of coffee hadn’t been touched.

It took me another few minutes to find the orderly who had been assigned to her. He said, “I don’t know where she is, sir. She left her quarters hours ago. Told me I needn’t wait. She didn’t say where she was going.”

“When did she send off her first dispatch?”

“She didn’t send off any dispatch, sir.”

“What?”

“Not by me, sir. She may have—”

I didn’t wait for him to finish.

I found her by searching all the remote corners of the Army post. Whatever was eating at her strongly enough to keep her from filing coverage on one of the great news breaks of our time, I guessed it would be something that took her off to think by herself.

I guessed right.

She was sitting on a tree stump by a disused road that ran down a hill to the river. The Skaro bridge was a few hundred yards below, about the same distance and in the same perspective from where she sat as it had been from our hilltop graveyard on the other side. The lights were on again, the guards posted. The brilliant band of illumination along the prohibited river bank, with its shimmering duplicate reflected in the water of the river, made the town look more than ever like a carnival setting, except that no merrymakers moved in the lights. Only armed guards. The searchlight from the minaret was trained in our direction, and although its beam was focused downward on the bridge, enough diffused light came across the river and up the hill to show Cora sitting on her roadside stump staring at the People’s Free Federal Republic.

The post command had dug up a WAC uniform for her, without insignia. Coming up behind her I couldn’t see the lack of regulation brass, but she was the only woman on the post who would be wearing WAC clothes and have her hair tied, back with a ribbon. There were other indications by which I could have recognized her in a far more anonymous dress than the one she wore. Even in
yashmak
and pantaloons.

I said, “What are you doing here?”

“Sitting.” She answered without turning her head.

“Why haven’t you filed your story?”

“I couldn’t write it.”

“Why not?”

“It wouldn’t jell.”

“That’s silly. Even if it doesn’t jell, you can at least put words together.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You’ll lose your job if you don’t file something, you know. I’m a couple of hours ahead of you already.”

“I suppose so.”

She wasn’t interested. She went on staring at the lights of Skaro.

“I’ll write it for you, if you like. I’ve got nothing else to do’.

“Would you, Jess? I’d be grateful.”

“You’d be more grateful if I went away and left you alone. What’s the matter?”

A minute later I said, “If something I’ve done or failed to do has anything to do with it – I suggest the possibility only because I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching during the last couple of hours – I apologize for a number of stupid mistakes.”

A minute after that I said, “You might as well tell me.”

It was still another minute before she let go.

“Danitza,” she said at last, miserably. “Heinz and Graham and Léon. Piotr and his girls. The farmer who fed us, and his family. Sixteen million others.”

“What about them?”

“Have you, in your soul-searching, stopped to think what we’ve done to them?”

“I've thought about it. I don’t see that we could have helped them by giving up.”

“No. But we’ve hurt them by winning, Jess. Bulič has never been beaten before. He can’t stand defeat. He isn’t sane. He’ll rage like a beast. Because of our escape, he’ll shoot dozens of others in our place. Hundreds. He’ll murder everyone whom he even suspects of helping us, people who were barely connected with us!’ It poured out of her, poison from a deep sore. “Everybody in the Republic will pay in part for our freedom! Those who are only shot will be lucky. He’ll turn his
rokos
loose like wolves, to beat, burn, and torment the people he can reach because he can’t reach us who beat him! He’ll find them all! Those two farm boys with their funny cracked voices – Piotr’s girls – poor babbling Danitza—”

Her voice failed. She put her face in her hands.

“So that’s why you can’t write. You still haven’t escaped Bulič.”

“I’ll never escape him! Never, never, never!”

It was my turn to look at the lights across the river.

The loudspeakers had either been toned down or the night wind was against them. I could barely hear the noise they made. I wondered how long it would be before the Party got organized to handle our escape in the way it would have to be handled, and the loudspeakers announced the correct Party line. Days, probably. Until then, no news would be coming out of the Republic. It was sealed off.

So it was hard for me to say what I did say. I had my story, the beat I had earned on my own. Nobody could get it away from me if I didn’t choose to surrender it. Cleary’s beat had been luck. Jim Oliver’s had been luck. Cora’s had been luck. Mine I had made for myself, the hard way. I stood on a clear path to the hall of journalistic fame with the exclusive of all exclusives, and I tossed it down the drain. It was a big price to pay for what I had to learn from her, but I paid it.

I said, “You can forget Bulič. He’s dead. Peaceful coexistence will be back in the saddle in a few days.”

She didn’t move. With her face buried in her hands and her shoulders bowed, she seemed to freeze, as if she had stopped breathing.

“I garroted him. I put two tight turns of wire around his throat in the loge of the mosque and tied a boy scout knot under his ear.”

She lifted her face then. I could see the glint of teardrops on the lashes of her wide eyes. It was the only time I had known her to weaken to the point of tears.

“I wasn’t thinking of making a story for myself when I did it,” I told her. “I just wanted to kill him. I tried to get us killed, too. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“I – think so.”

“I wish you’d tell me, then.” I was sweating, all of a sudden, although it was cold there on the hill. “You set me at damn near everything I did, with one trick or another. You tricked me in the mosque. I know how you did it, although I don’t see what you hoped to accomplish by it unless you wanted to get us shot, and if that was what you were after you – it doesn’t matter. What I really want to know—” I had to swallow before I went on. My throat muscles weren’t working properly. “What I’ve got to know is whether or not the -graveyard – was only another trick.”

She went on staring at me with wide startled eyes, tears winking in her lashes, for another moment. The lights of Skaro gleamed at us from across the river. Then, without a word, she stood up and walked away, over the hilltop and out of sight.

I sat down on the stump.

I don’t remember what emotions I really felt during the next quarter of an hour, except that I didn’t care about my lost beat any more. A news beat isn’t as important as some other things. If you fumble one story, you can always write another. History has a way of making news from day to day. Time marches on, the moving finger writes. The Moslems shrug it off with
Inshallah:
as Allah wills it. I was philosophizing with the top of my mind to keep from falling into the black bottom of it when she came up behind me – I heard her, but I wasn’t going to invite any further pointless conversations – wrapped her arms round my head and pulled it tightly against her breast.

“You poor boob,” she said.

I felt more philosophical than ever.
Inshallah.

“You poor, dumb man!’ She tightened her headlock a notch, twisting my neck. “I should have slapped you! To ask a question like that – if you weren’t so – if I didn’t – Jess, I thought we were going to die, in the graveyard. When you gave up, I gave up. I thought we had only a few hours. I wanted to live all the life I had left with you. Didn’t you know?”

“How could I know?”

“
How could you not know?”

“
You didn’t say anything.”

She sighed. I could feel the sigh against my cramped cheek.

“What was there for me to say? What did you have to say?”

I couldn’t think of an answer. She went on, with amazement, “Didn’t you ever see the real reason why I told you I would go or stay as you liked, when Piotr asked us to stay? Could I have made it any plainer how I felt, without beating you over your thick-head?” The amazement became complete incredulity when she asked her final question.

“Didn’t you
know
?”

There are times when the best answer is to keep quiet. I swiveled round on the stump, turning the way she had my neck twisted until I had unwound the twist and was in a better position to take hold of her and say nothing.

That way, I could no longer see the lights of Skaro. But another illumination grew and brightened in my mind.

FIN

ABOUT DAVID DODGE