The Lights of Skaro (25 page)

“I’m going to short the power supply. As soon as the lights blow, we’ll run for the bridge. We’ll go past the guards outside the door too fast for them to do anything about it, and club our way through the rest.”

“The bridge is impassable, Jess! The barbed wire —”

“You say it’s impassable, Bulič says it’s impassable, thirty- two thousand
rokos
and the Red Army say it’s impassable. I say it isn’t. The rug goes over the barbed wire, we go over the rug. The only light I can be certain of putting out is the searchlight from the minaret. If I can blow the others, so much the better, but the bridge is certain to be dark. We go that way. Anything else you want to talk about before we start?”

Her face was in shadow. I couldn’t see her expression. In a moment she answered quietly, “No. Nothing else.”

“You’re sure?”

I waited for her to say something, anything, that would wipe out the hatred I felt for her. I didn’t want to die hating her.

All she said was, “Shall I carry the rug?”

“You’ll have to. I’ll be busy with the table leg. Stay close behind me and keep your head down, low. That’s all.”

We made no noise on the soft carpets as we crept across the mosque, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark in the stroboscope of the window beams, to where the heavy wires ran up the wall and disappeared through the roof. I ripped them loose by insulating my hands again with the papers, then yanking until the wires stretched and pulled free. I couldn’t tell from any change in the apparent illumination what had happened to the searchlight, but it had to be out. A faint call of inquiry outside, and a fainter answer of doubt from high in the air, confirmed it. While the calling went on, I took the two hot ends of the power line in my insulated hands, brought them into a beam of light where I could see what I was doing, and put them together.

If there was a fuse in the line, it was a strong one. The generator hum changed, died, rose again. The light I was working by flickered, but the metal of the touching wires fused and disappeared in a crackling spurt of bright sparks and molten copper before the short took effect. A blob of the molten metal fell on my instep. I hardly felt the burn. I brought the wires together again, again got a temporary short and a flicker of the lights, and again the wires fused. There was more shouting from outside now. I was down to bare short stubs of exposed wire when I tried it a third time, but the generator was still bucking from the second surge of power through the line. I caught it in mid-buck. The short arced, glowed and held. The lights went out for good.

The guards who were outside the door collaborated with us by rushing into the mosque as soon as the door was opened. I was afraid that their orders might hold them outside until they were told to enter. In the sudden dark, finding that the door was barred against them, they suspected trouble and charged in as soon as Cora dropped the bar and jumped out of the way.

I swung with the table-leg as they came through the doorway, not chopping down from above but horizontally into their charge, as the batter swings at a baseball coming in the groove. I couldn’t possibly have missed. My swing was higher than for a pitched ball, about face level.

One man went down without a sound at the first blow. The other went down over him and screamed in an ugly, muffled way until I found his head with the table-leg after several misses. They were soldiers, both armed. One of the guns fell on my toe, so I didn’t have to waste time groping for it.

It was a Schmeisser. I recognized it by the odd angle of the short stock. I had never fired a machine-pistol in my life. But I had seen them in use and I knew what happens with a fully automatic weapon when you push the safety off and hold your finger on the trigger. It was a more effective killer than a table-leg, and it had an additional advantage that it would spot us for return fire. I still had no hope for anything but a quick death without nastiness. To be certain that we stayed together and presented a good target I abandoned the table-leg, took Cora’s hand and ran in the direction of the bridge, the heavy Schmeisser in my other hand hammering an aimless bright stream of fire into the darkness ahead of us. So that there could be no mistake, I yelled wildly, “Here we come! Here we come!”

The bald recklessness of it took us farther than I expected. Whatever went through the startled minds of the guards at the bridgehead, they could not have imagined that two escaping prisoners would come screaming at them, asking to be shot. They had only split seconds to think about it before the flickering muzzle-blast of my gun showed us the gap of the narrow bridge ahead of us and the shapes of the guards who flanked the bridgehead, their weapons coming up uncertainly to return the fire they did not understand, did not recognize as a threat to them until it was too late. I knocked them over like tin silhouettes in a shooting gallery. I had to drop Cora’s hand in order to use both of my own to hold the Schmeisser’s muzzle down against its bucking kick, but I swept them away with a hose of flame before they could pull trigger. I gloried in the killings. I felt like a god, with lightning at my fingertips.

The lightning died suddenly when my clip of shells ran out. I snatched another gun from a dead guard as we stumbled over the bodies. The reek of gunpowder and hot metal was incense in the god’s nostrils. I wanted to kill again. I had tasted the sacrifice, and it was wonderful.

The guards in the middle of the bridge did not open up on us immediately. One of them squeezed off a nervous spurt of shots that went over our heads because of the rising curvature of the bridge. Somebody with a cooler head shouted a command and the firing stopped. They were waiting for us, waiting for me to fire first and give our position away. They couldn’t miss us in the narrow slot of the bridge, once they knew the range.

That was good, and the shorter the range the better. I went towards them, holding Cora’s wrist, tugging her along impatiently when she held back. I was eager for blood, death, and the successful outcome of my scheme to beat Bulič and the
rokos,
once and for all.

It was a genuine eagerness while it lasted. I felt no fear. I was, I suppose, irrational at that point, but I was certainly fully prepared to kill and be killed. I dragged Cora on against an increasing backward pull that only irritated me,

She was trying to say something. I whispered impatiently, “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to get closer to them!” and yanked her forward.

“Jess ! Jess ! Listen to me!” She had come near enough with my urgent yank to make her own whisper heard. “I’ve lost the rug! But we’re above the river. All we have to do is drop over and swim! Don’t you understand? We don’t have to fight our way across the bridge! We’re above the river!”

I was immediately sane and afraid. When you have accepted death, got over cringing from the idea and written yourself off, it’s a horrible thing to be dragged back to hope of life. Gooseflesh broke out all over me. My knees shook. A cold ball of fear formed in my stomach. Behind us, men were shouting orders. Hand-lights had begun to flicker, bobbing jerkily and swiftly towards us through the square. Ahead of us, men with levelled weapons waited to touch trigger at the first glimpse of our shadows. The machine-gunners in the minaret waited for the same glimpse. We were naked and alone and helpless, within moments of the death I had worked for, and safety lay below us in the rushing, unseen darkness of the river that was at once armor, screen, and a vehicle to carry us away if we could reach it from the brink of annihilation. The split seconds it took me to drop the gun, boost Cora to the bridge parapet, scramble up beside her and leap with her out and away as far as we could jump were a part of my existence I will remember as dragging eternities of wincing terror.

We were suspended, for a moment in mid-air, between life and death. It was that close. They saw us on the parapet, either outlined against the stars or in a flash from one of the hand-lights. Automatic weapons hammered in a long roll. There were flashes of fire that we sensed as winks of light above us while we were falling.

Jumping feet first, the only way we could hope to drop an unjudgeable distance without breaking our backs, we went very deep. Floating to the surface, I swam hard with the strong pull of the current, staying under until my breath gave out. When I at last had to come up for air I was even farther downstream than I had hoped. Unharmed, free, and confident of my capabilities in the water, I risked a call to Cora. She called back from somewhere behind me, not far.

They couldn’t have heard us above the rush of water around the bridge piers and their own noise. They were shooting, spraying the river with methodical patterns of fire that reached out, radius after successive radius, to the farthest range of their weapons, roman candles of flame following our probable movement with the stream. But they misjudged the speed of the current. We were beyond and below their fire all the way. When the speedboats under the bluff finally roared into movement and came after us, their searchlights poking for us across the water, we were five hundred yards below the bridge and being carried ever closer to the far bank by the wide sweep of the current.

I wasn’t worried about speedboats at that distance. The middle of the river marked the extent of Free Territory. They would hesitate to cross it with their lights showing even if they caught up with us before we reached the bank. I wasn’t worried that they could do that. I wasn’t worried about anything, only dully aware that we had made it and that I felt about Cora as I had at the beginning. I no longer hated her. I had no real right to hate her. She was only a girl I had never pretended to care for, a burden and a responsibility I had to bring safely ashore before I could abandon her. I kept calling to her, demanding answers so I could keep her located: “Are you all right?” and, “Take it easy. How is your wind?” and, “Keep pushing to your right. Can you feel the current slackening?” and, “How are you doing?” until she panted, “I’m – all – right. Don’t – make -me – talk.” After that I swam at her left side, shouldering her crosswise out of the current to safety, completing the job I had to do without pride that I had brought her through it all, that it was I who had protected and supported and sheltered and shepherded and saved her with my brains, strength, and cleverness, until we swam into a slow swirl of slack water and touched down on a mudbank.

A screen of bush and trees beyond the mudbank hid us from probing searchlights and the remote risk of a long rifle shot when the speedboats got that far. They went by once, far out, again going home. We rested on a rotten log and watched their lights through the screening bushes, exhausted and shivering. It was bitterly cold.

After a while Cora said, with a poor attempt at brightness, “Well, we did it.”

“Yes.”

“Some gesture of celebration seems appropriate.”

I knew what she meant, but I wanted no part of her charm turned on for me, then or ever. I said, “Let’s celebrate by moving along before we freeze to death.”

She made no more suggestions that we kindle warmth between us.

Search parties were out patrolling the roads before we started walking. The Free Territory command knew from the fireworks on the bridge that a breakout of some kind had been attempted. It made them look around on their side of the river. Breakouts had succeeded before, although we were told that nobody else had ever come through Skaro with a full-scale send-off like ours.

We were picked up by a jeep-load of soldiers, not Americans this time but Britishers, four Tommies who took off their blouses to cover us and brought out from under the jeep seat a bottle of
rakia,
strictly against regulations and very welcome to people in our condition. Everyone pretended not to notice the
rakia
fumes when we reached headquarters. We were questioned by a board of officers representing the U.N. authority; an English major, an American major, and, most luckily, a French captain who knew Cora by sight. He had met her in Paris. As soon as they had satisfied themselves that we were what we claimed to be, they had the good sense to give us quarters and let us sleep, putting the real questioning off until the next afternoon.

It was a thorough job when they got down to it. It lasted for several hours. We had to lead them step by step into the People’s Free Federal Republic, through it, and out again, with names, dates, and places. We both protested the questioning. As civilians and working reporters we had every right to put our own stories on the cables before the news about us leaked to other press services. The board guaranteed that there would be no leaks, and that once we had supplied them with whatever information we could they would not only give us a free hand, but set us up with radio contact to the nearest cable office and a place to work, as well as free board and room. With that understanding, we co-operated. Not too freely, and not volunteering any information that was also news except in answer to direct questions, but enough to get them excited. There had been no uncensored news from the Republic for a long time, a complete blackout for several days. All they knew was that every other press correspondent in the Republic had been jailed for espionage, and diplomatic relations were strained very thin. We had considerably more to report than their own intelligence service.

After it was over they gave us what they had promised. I drew a room at Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, a typewriter, even an orderly to run messages page by page to the radiocenter. Also cigarettes and a pot of coffee. It was very
de luxe.

Cora had equivalent accommodations somewhere else. I didn’t see anything of her for a while. To match the story I knew she would be writing, I sent off two thousand words about the upset that had taken place in the Republic. Yoreska’s death, Bulič’s seizure of power, and an analysis of the political trend which could be expected as a result of the palace revolution. The political analysis would have every expert in the field calling me crazy in print until time proved me right and they had to eat their words. I led with my chin, wide open, making flat predictions which were against all apparent probabilities. We, Cora and I, weren’t important spot news at Double Double Urgent cable rates, so I left us out of it. I saved our story for the follow-up. I intended to write the follow-up of all time. My first flash was only to attract attention to it. I meant it to be a piece of journalism that would be held up as an example to generations of newspapermen. Not just another I-Was-There-As-Told-By-Big-Name-To-Small-Name, but I Was There And Caused It To Happen. I, Jess Matthews, Maker of History as well as reporter of news.