Free The Lights of Skaro by David Dodge Page B

a vomiting woman except that she is sick. She got over it in a moment. After we had gone a little farther, I persuaded one of the ewes to stray off into the roadside ditch, and scooped a tin cup full of ditch-water when I went to herd it back. Cora rinsed her mouth and adjusted her yashmak, her eyes thankful above it as she returned the cup.
    There was nothing to do after that but plod. The road was a stream of peasants, livestock, and carts, some moving faster than we were, some slower, so that we were always passing or being passed and could not talk safely even if we had had anything to talk about. The stream thinned gradually as groups turned off on side roads. We had to stay with the stream until dark, then leave it as if we had a fixed destination in mind, find a place to hide for the night, and find further, without being able to buy, bargain or trade, a cover to substitute for the goats when we went on the next day. Some peasants, probably most of those around us, would be willing to help us if they knew the position we were in. But others would sell us for the reward they would get, and we dared not take a chance on revealing ourselves to the wrong ones. Yet we were going to need help, or risk another dangerous theft.
    It was a headache. I had to think about it, plan something. But I was so done in that I couldn’t concentrate. The goats were weary themselves, overdriven to the point that they didn’t even try to stray from the road, only moved along listlessly ahead of us to keep beyond the reach of our sticks. Cora, when she got over her shakiness, took it upon herself to do what little herding was necessary.
    It was a good thing that she was able to. I didn’t have an ounce of energy left. I could only plod, lifting one heavy foot to put in front of the other, step after step, mile after monotonous mile towards the setting sun, trying to think ahead for the time when the sun would disappear below the horizon and force a decision on us, my mind always sliding helplessly backward to those two rokos and the way they had grunted as they swung their fists.
    I was afraid of them. Not their sub-human minds, but their fists. I couldn’t argue myself out of that, or pretend that physical pain wasn’t a thing to dread, or persuade myself, a civilized man, that what would happen to Cora in their hands was nothing for me to think about. They would hammer us both to a pulp when they took us. As a preliminary softening, so that we would be in the right condition for refinements when they took us to Bulič.
    Bulič. Bulič. Bulič. Bulič. The syllables dogged my dragging heels.
     
    He had his finger on me from the first minute I came through the Curtain. I wasn’t particularly honored. All foreigners got the same treatment, particularly foreign reporters. Cora, Heinz, Léon, Graham, and Jim Oliver had been through the same thing, as I had in Poland and Russia. But Bulič was more thorough than some of his counterparts.
    I came on the Orient Express, the only train connecting East and West on a regular schedule. It would have been easier for me to fly in from Vienna, but when you get a visa to go through the Curtain you do it according to what the visa says. Mine said by train, on such and such a date, at such and such a place of entry.
    I don’t know who else was on the train. I may have been the only passenger. Grossing the border, I had an entire railroad car to myself except for two Red Army guards who stood in the vestibules with their backs to the doors during the first eight kilometers, when there were shields over the outside windows so that passengers couldn’t see anything of the fortified border zone. The train stopped at a small town where the shields were taken down, the guards got off and Border Control took over.
    The Border Control officials were army men, in uniform, with the Red Star at the peaks of their caps. They were reserved, formal, and reasonably