Read Online The Lights of Skaro by David Dodge - Free Book Online Page B

need?”
    “Nothing.” He chewed moodily for a while on a piece of bread he was using to sop up gravy. “Sleeping pills, maybe. If you could get her to take them.”
    “Is she jumpy?”
    “Like a flea. She doesn’t belong there, Jess. She’s as much out of place in a police state as I’d be on a ladies’ volley-ball team. It’s no place for a girl. For hardshells like you and me, O.K. But—”
    “Have you ever suggested to Cora that she wasn’t as capable of doing her job as any man alive?”
    “She’s a pighead, I know. But the wear and tear shows on her. She smokes too much, drinks too much. I was getting the jumps myself, and I’ve been through it before. It’s worse even than Czechoslovakia. The loudspeakers yammer at you from five in the morning until midnight. When they shut up at last and you have a chance to sleep, you worry about the story you’ve just filed, you worry about your contacts, you worry about knocks on the door, you worry about an overnight shift in the Party line that will trap you Inside before you hear about it, you worry about everything. Bulič’s rokos are watching you all the time. I tell you, Jess – and I know you were in Warsaw and Moscow, but I still say it – you never saw thugs like Bulič’s bully-boys. They scare you just to look at them. Apes! Gorillas! Sub-men!”
    His voice rose higher with each word, then dropped again.
    “That’s another thing with Cora. She worries like the rest of us, and she’s scared stiff of Bulič. Physically. She gets the shudders just to look at him. We brave males don’t mind admitting that he scares us, but she’s too proud to confess it to any of us. It might sound like feminine weakness. There isn’t another woman in the whole bloody country she can talk to, let her hair down with. She’s all bottled up in herself. If you have any influence with her, Jess, for God’s sake get her out of there!”
    “Nobody has any influence with Cora. She makes up her own mind. But it must be pretty bad.”
    “Wait until you’ve had a few months in the People’s Paradise, friend.”
    “I mean the way you feel about her.”
    He flushed, then grinned.
    “Well, all right. Sure, I do. I asked her to name the date a couple of days before I left.”
    “What did she say?”
    “What she says to all the other candidates, I guess. She claims she wasn’t cut out to be a wife, only a reporter.” He made a face. “A girl like that. She patted my hand, though.”
    “That’s encouraging. Tell me more about Bulič.”
    “Bulič. Well, Bulič.” Oliver’s face sobered. “An ugly man, Jess. Ugly inside. Absolutely ruthless. The perfect man for his job. He’ll go after Yoreska one of these days, and I give him better than an even chance to come out on top of the heap. There isn’t a drop of softness in him anywhere, or weakness, or real loyalty to anything but himself. Only ambition and cruelty. He’s been a Party man all his life, but only because it served his ends, gave him the ladder he needed. Yoreska is relatively civilized alongside of Bulič. You may even like him. Bulič belongs in the jungle.”
    “Why hasn’t he gone after Yoreska before?”
    “Yoreska has the army, as well as the Party organization. All Bulič has is his Security thugs. So far.”
    “I heard a rumor in Istanbul that the man who helped the Gorzas get out of the country was Bulič himself.”
    Oliver laughed, without humor.
    “Somebody had been hitting the hemp leaves if you did. The only way Bulič would help anyone out of the People’s Paradise is in a basket.”
    “I didn’t think much of the rumor. Tell me one thing more, Jim. Was there any connection between your proposal to Cora, and the fact that you were fed up with the job, and the story you filed that any reporter as experienced as you are would realize was enough to get you thrown out?”
    “None of your business. I’m through talking. But I’ll give you a final