The Lights of Skaro (11 page)

“He would not have confessed a murder. We don’t kill. Not even to save our own lives. They could not have made him say it.”

“You may be right. But if he
had
been made to say it, publicly and apparently of his own will, do you see what would have happened? It would have disgraced his leadership. He wouldn’t have been a martyr to passive resistance, but a bloody-handed renegade. Who would follow his preachings then? What would have happened to the opposition he organized and led? What would have been left to fight the Party?”

Piotr sat quiet, his head bent. I let him think about it while I reached for cigarettes. He took his with a scowl which wasn’t meant for me or the cigarette.

The chip in the fireplace blazed again as a gust of the night breeze passed over our shelter, sucking a draught up the chimney. Cora picked the chip from the coals to hold it as a light; first for Piotr, then for me, then for herself before she put it back in the fire. We smoked for a while.

I said, “Somebody – it doesn’t matter to you who he was – saw what would happen if Djakovo was taken. Then somebody got him out of the country.”

I had the story in my mind as I wanted to tell it.

It was really Jim Oliver’s story. The home office gave him my soft spot when they gave me his difficult one. He was roving, looking for by-line material as I had been, when Djakovo made his break-out. Oliver had the good luck to be in Free Territory within a few miles of the point where Djakovo’s runaway switch engine crashed through the final barrier. He was on the job minutes after the first report came in. He got a news-flash off first, beating the field, then pumped Djakovo dry and wrote a magnificent dramatic follow-up, one of those ‘I Did It’ pieces in the first person as-told-to-Small-Name-by-Big-Name, Big Name in this case Anton Djakovo and Small Name Oliver’s well-earned by-line.

He guessed what might happen when the story broke. Because of our conversation in Vienna and the vague tip I had given him in the form of a rumor, he sent me a manuscript copy of the follow-up as soon as he had finished it, before it was published. I got it by airmail just before Yoreska clamped censorship on, so I couldn’t send out what I learned to supplement Oliver at my own end. But I knew the whole story, at least as much as anyone ever knew of it.

The break-out, with the censorship that followed, happened a week after Bulič had promised Djakovo’s early arrest and Yoreska put a public barb in him about it in front of the entire foreign press representation. During that week I was too busy to think about anything but the mechanics of my job. I had to re-tap the pipelines Oliver had set up, establish public connection with a number of people who were useless as sources of information but screened the few who were from being identified by Security, find a place to live in the overcrowded city, arrange other things. I saw Cora only once, briefly, when I delivered the things I had brought her from Outside. She wasn’t interested in chit-chat and I didn’t have time for it.

We had no teletype set-up. Cables were adequate, but cablegrams took time to prepare. I was used to working under direct censorship. Not under it at that time, I had to learn the trick of putting just the right slant on what I sent out, so that it conveyed more than bare words without implying too much for safety. Arguments have been made that a reporter’s function is that of a neutral observer, responsible only for an objective presentation of news from which a reader can draw his own conclusions and form his own opinions. I never held with those arguments, particularly when the only news reportable is loaded in one direction or another. When Yoreska issued a press release demonstrating to the Western world the truly democratic and liberal program of the People’s Free Federal Republic with the announcement that, from then on, house arrests of political criminals would not be made between midnight and five a.m., I re-vamped it in a way that would sharpen the point, draw attention to the kind of a government it was that could boast of democratic liberality in permitting citizens with the wrong political views to sleep for five hours out of twenty-four without fear of being snatched from their beds by the bully-boys and carted off to a labor camp. I was at the cable office, which was also the post office, worrying over the exact wording of my dispatch when Oliver’s airmail letter came through, marked Urgent and Immediate.

A contact I had made at the post office saw that I got it according to instructions. I was reading about Djakovo’s escape in his own words before anyone in the Republic, with the exception of Bulič, a few of his
rokos,
Yoreska, and possibly Danitza, knew that he had slipped through their fingers. I think Danitza knew because Cora heard about the escape before any other reporter except me.

The railroad junction at Varya Banya, where Djakovo was pocketed, used to be an important switching point on the main east-west line between the Republic and what later became Free Territory under the U.N. Along about 1946, when the Curtain began to function, Varya Banya became a railhead, the north-western end of the Republic’s train system. The double tracks leading westward from the junction were blocked off with a heavy barrier made of bolted ties and railroad steel, solid enough to stop a locomotive. The true border was eight kilometers farther out, five miles across a security zone patrolled by armed guards with dogs, guns, and orders to shoot on sight. Although there were three roads and one rail line open through the western security zone at other points, and commercial planes could fly over it through certain channels, no traffic of any kind was permitted in the Varya Banya area, for reasons satisfactory to the Party psychology. The railroad tracks were not torn up. But at the frontier itself they were closed off by an ordinary plank fence, enough to keep the West out. At Varya Banya junction the East was kept in by the heavy barrier across the tracks and a high wire fence around the whole railroad yard, with Army guards posted at the gates to stop such subversives as the peasant who got by them.

The peasant’s excuse for entering the yard was a donkey-load of firewood which had been ordered by the yardmaster. He had a pass for himself and the donkey, properly signed. The Army guard who let him in was shot just the same. Underneath the firewood there were dynamite, a pinchbar, and a machine-pistol. The
rokos
found evidence how all three had been used.

Djakovo was already in the yard when, just after dark, the peasant drove his donkey across the tracks towards the yard-master’s house, which was within a few feet of the track barrier. Djakovo would never say how he got as far as the yard except that it had been difficult – an understatement. Security knew he was in the immediate area, had blocked every escape, or so they thought, and were patrolling streets and roads as they closed in on him. He avoided them somehow, got by the yard guards and made contact, according to instructions he followed blindly and faithfully without even knowing whose they were, with the driver of the yard’s only switch engine, a creaky, pre-war teapot that was more than adequate to handle the little switching necessary at the railhead.

There was no switching to be done that night. But the engine had steam up, and Djakovo and the engine-driver waited together in the cab. Djakovo wore a fireman’s cap, a sweat-rag around his neck, and smears of coal-dust on his face to disguise it.

He didn’t know where he was going or how his escape had been arranged. He thought at first that it was Allah’s work, an answer to his prayers. The instructions had reached him while he was on his knees, facing Mecca. He was a gentle, trusting man who wanted to live and carry on his work, but he swore to Oliver that he would have given himself up rather than accept such a means for escape if he had known what the scheme was. It is another indication of the cleverness of the mind behind the scheme that Djakovo, unalterably opposed to violence of any kind, was forced into a violent escape, his only chance and the last one to be expected of him, as Gorza, a timid man, was tricked into a bold escape, the last one to be expected of him.

The driver of the switch engine knew where they were going and how they were going to go about it. He thought Djakovo was a crackpot visionary, but he had his own reasons for wanting to leave Varya Banya permanently and had been promised success if he took Djakovo with him. He told Djakovo that much, nothing more. He was tightmouthed and nervous, waiting for his signal. He swore at Djakovo when Djakovo kept asking his gentle questions.

“Shut up and feed some coal into the firebox,” he said angrily. “The steam will drop as soon as I open the throttle. Keep it high, and shovel like the devil as soon as we start. That’s all I ask of you.”

“But where are we going? How are we going to leave the yard?”

“With wings, preacher. How else? Like angels.”

Djakovo shoveled. He was a small man, slightly built. He was clumsy with the heavy coal scoop. What he didn’t spill landed in a lump in the middle of the firebox instead of fanning out over the coals.

The driver said, “Take smaller scoops. Twist the scoop when you pitch it. You’re not shoveling gospel now.”

“It isn’t chaff, either,” Djakovo answered mildly. “When will we start?”

He asked other questions, none of which was answered. The driver was peering anxiously into the night, his fingers closing and unclosing on the throttle. To open the throttle committed them both inevitably to freedom or death, and the moment for it was approaching. The engineer had seen the shadows of the peasant and the loaded donkey pass in front of the light from the yardmaster’s windows, on their way into darkness beyond.

Djakovo saw the shadows as well, without knowing their significance. But because of the driver’s sweating attention to the shadows as they disappeared in the direction of the barrier, he began to suspect what was going to happen. Not the details, only the idea.

He had no intention of leaving the Republic and the struggle he led. He was prepared for martyrdom, if martyrdom was necessary. He said, “If the way out is across the border, I will not go. Is that the plan?”

“Stop quacking at me! Do your job and let me do mine.”

The driver’s face was streaming. He mopped his forehead with the sweat-rag, leaning out of the cab window in a vain attempt to see what could not be seen.

Passive resistance was Djakovo’s weapon. Until his question was answered he refused to shovel coal. He leaned on the coal scoop, waiting; for five minutes, ten minutes, while the driver hung from the cab window straining his eyes.

The old engine wasted a lot of pressure through steam leaks. The gauge was dangerously low when the driver, in the strained voice of a man watching his executioner approach, said, “Here he comes! Get ready!” He turned away from the cab window, looked automatically at the steam gauge, cursed, jumped from his seat, pulled the scoop from Djakovo’s hand and began to throw coal frantically into the firebox. He paid no attention at all to Djakovo’s demands for an answer to his question. He was back in his seat at the throttle when the peasant, unhurriedly leading the now-unloaded donkey, reached the points that marked the connection of their track with the main line. The red eye of light from the switch lamp was pointed at them, a green glow from the other eye on the peasant as he pushed his pinchbar into the lock, twisted a couple of turns of the donkey’s lead rope around the bar and kicked the animal’s rump.

The donkey’s lunge cracked the lock of the points. In a moment the lights changed; green eye for them, red glow on the peasant. The track was open at the precise moment that the barrier went up with a roar and a spouting blossom of flame which illuminated, for an instant, the whole yard.

They saw broken pieces of ties and rail suspended in midair, the peasant beckoning from the switch, the startled donkey squatting in fright, his ears back and his mouth open in a bray of terror that was lost in the rolling thunder of the explosion. Then it was dark again, except for low flames where the barrier had been.

The cranky old engine began to move, steam whooshing from its cylinders as it gathered speed. The driver groaned,

“Shovel, preacher, shovel!” Djakovo, as dazed and frightened as the donkey, brayed his own bray of protest:

“Violence solves no problems! Dynamite will never break the barriers to man’s freedom of mind!” but shoveled under the compulsion of the moment. His words were drowned in the noise of debris raining down on the roof of the cab, the donkey’s terrified hee-haws, the clack of points under their wheels, the hiss of steam in the cylinders.

The engine began to rock as it turned into the disused main line, gathering speed. At the points the peasant came swarming up the cab steps, his weapon slung from his shoulder. By that time shouts were coming from the darkness around them, then spurting streams of bullets that pinged and whined from the metal of the engine and its tender. Sprawled out on the coal of the tender, the peasant answered the fire. The driver, with the first shots, had cut in his headlight, illuminating the track ahead of them and the burning debris of the barrier. In the beam a figure ran out of the yardmaster’s house, shouted something in a voice half of despair, half of fury, and fired a single shot at the cab as they passed. The man had ducked back under cover before the forward movement of the engine brought him within range of the peasant’s fire from the tender. They crunched bumpily through the remains of the barrier and rolled into the night beyond the yard limits, shots and shouts fading behind them.

The engine was still gathering speed and an increased rocking movement on the poor track. The rock made it difficult for Djakovo to shovel. He did not know why he wasshoveling. His arms and shoulders worked at it clumsily while his mind said stubbornly in time to the rhythm:
All violence is wrong. All violence is wrong.

The peasant crawled back from the tender, stood his weapon in a corner and took the coal scoop. Bulky and sweating in his heavy sheepskin coat, felt trousers, and skullcap, his booted feet braced wide to steady himself, he took over the job that was to bring Djakovo to safety in spite of himself.