The Lights of Skaro Read Online Free Page B

important officials had a car. We were well treated. But there were Security police with us always, night and day. We were never allowed to travel more than fortykilometers from the capital. I knew, long before Sigmund did, that they had no intention of letting us go, ever.”
    When the contract expired, Gorza found out what they were really up against. His application for return of their passport and an exit visa was answered by a statement that the passport had expired and was invalid. An application for a laissez-passer to leave the country was ignored. Another application, for repatriation under the U.N. covenant, was rejected on a technicality. Gorza kept on filing more applications, desperate for some key that would unlock the door. He was an old man, a scholar, not a man of action. The thought of trying to get away without proper papers never occurred to him. With Security close at his coat-tails twenty-four hours a day, and his wife as a further encumbrance, he was helpless.
    “Then, without warning, we received the laissez-passer ,” Madame Gorza said in her thin, gentle Viennese voice. “It was in the letter-box when we got up one morning. We thought it strange, but they did things like that, without explanation. So that we would never understand, and would feel helpless against them.” Her hands twisted in her lap. “We didn’t understand. But there was the paper, and our guards had been withdrawn. For the first time in six years, you see. It is hard for me to explain just how we felt, how unbelievable it all seemed, how distrustful we were of a trick, and at the same time hopeful, afraid to believe what we wanted to believe—”
    “I can understand,” I said. “What did the laissez-passer say, exactly?”
    “I don’t remember the wording, but it gave us twelve hours to leave the country, by way of Sjolnič. It—“
    “Only twelve hours?”
    “Yes. I couldn’t forget that. It was very curt, more like an order to get out than a permission. It was on the letterhead of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Minister himself had signed it, or so we believed. We had reason to know his signature well.” She added simply, ‘So we went to Sjolnič.”
    There was much more to it than that. Private citizens do not move freely on the roads behind the Curtain, and private citizens driving a car are unheard of. She told me that they were stopped and questioned so many times that they lost count. Each stop was a hell of a suspense, another delay that might end with their being sent back, or held beyond the twelve-hour deadline. They had not wasted a minute, stopping only to pack a couple of suitcases and run – they had no friends to whom they chose to say goodbye – but it took more than ten hours of agonizing progress from check point to check point, with the laissez-passer to be read, questioned and grudgingly returned at each stop, before they got to the border station beyond Sjolnič, less than two hundred miles from the capital and just under three miles from freedom.
    On the map, Sjolnič appears to be at the frontier. The village is actually a dozen miles behind it, the border post nine or ten miles past the village in a little wooded valley, so that there was a no-man’s land beyond the post that could be regarded as the thickness of the Curtain. The road they were on was the only permissible way to pass through it in that area. Anyone caught off the road in the quarantined zone was either shot or arrested on sight, depending on how the roving zone patrols felt about it. The road itself was blocked, according to Madame Gorza’s description, by what must have been an old tank-trap, concrete pillars set into the roadbed between a jut of hillside and the bank of a creek. When the time came, she had to take the car carefully through the trap in low gear, cramping the wheels back and forth to get between the pillars. She did all the driving – Gorza