The Lights of Skaro Read Online Free

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