The Lights of Skaro Read Online Free Page A

defenses.
    “I tried to do a story on it, human-interest stuff. It wouldn’t come off. But Madame Gorza was one of the most remarkable women I ever met. She was the strong one of that pair. Without her, he never would have made it.”
    “Thanks.”
    She handed me the cigarette at the same time she said it, so I wasn’t sure whether she had thanked me for a couple of puffs of smoke, or a compliment to her sex, or what she saw I was trying to do for her morale. I didn’t care. I was helping my own morale at the same time. Talking about a man and a woman who had escaped the rokos, worked their way through danger and guards and closed borders, to freedom, was as warming as a blanket. They had had help, and we had none. But their help had come to them unexpectedly when they needed it most, without their asking for it. As it might come to us. I didn’t expect it ever would. But I went on talking about their good luck just the same, dragging the story out and inventing details I didn’t know, to talk the night and our nightmares away.
     
    The escape made a front-page splash in the United States as well as in Western Europe. It happened several months after the big switch in the external Party line, from Hate Everybody to Sweet Reasonableness with Co-existent Capitalism. The reasons for the switch are something history will decide, but what Gorza had to say about conditions in the People’s Free Federal Republic after he was safely out of it had a lot to do with the establishment of a Western policy of watchful wait-and-see. People listened to him because he was Sigmund Gorza. Other refugees had got out of the Republic before, hundreds of them. But they were mostly dispossessed middle-class shopkeepers, or men and women too old to work, or jailbirds, people the Republic didn’t want and were willing to let the West feed. No real attempt was made to keep them from filtering out through the Curtain, although now and then several would be caught and jailed, and as an example, a few shot. Men like Dr. Gorza were guarded night and day, and never allowed within twenty miles of a border in any circumstances.
    He was an Austrian professor, a specialist in agronomy and food synthesis, one of the greatest living authorities in his field, more valuable to the Republic’s backward, opposition-riddled agrarian economy than ten thousand acres of growing wheat, and as great a loss when he got away from them. Ed Cleary, of Allied Press, was the first reporter to talk to him and Madame Gorza after they were out. Ed had the good luck to be in Istanbul when they got that far. He scored a clean beat over all the competition, including me. I was covering for American Newspaper Alliance, on a temporary assignment that took me to Ankara when I should have been in Istanbul.
    I talked to the Gorzas afterwards. Not to match Ed’s story, which I couldn’t do, but because I had an idea for a story of my own with a different angle. The woman’s angle, in this case. I by-passed Gorza to talk to his wife about how a woman feels with her life and her husband’s life thrust into her hands.
    They didn’t even know they were escaping until the last minute. They had been trapped in the Republic for six years, ever since the Party took power after the war. Gorza had had a research contract with the Liberal Government that preceded the Party. When the Party took control they took over Gorza, his laboratory and the contract as well.
    Madame Gorza said, “At first they promised us that we would be free to go when the contract ran out.” She was a thin, grey woman with a deeply-lined face. She kept her hands folded in her lap while she talked. Sometimes they twisted at each other or at the handkerchief she held. “They gave Sigmund everything he needed for his experiments, and a house, and a car. Very few people had an entire house to themselves, even a small one like ours, and almost nobody except very