Stephen Marlowe

“ We have to find freedom our own way. Oh, we conform. We cry when we're supposed to, and laugh. But at night we listen to the radio and learn some of the truth, so that when the Karadi get bored with us and decide to leave, we can take our places in a free world. Took me two years to build that short-wave out of spare parts, but it was worth every minute."
"What do you do when they come around hunting?" Mr. Friedlander asked. ”

“ We'll let the announcement stick in the paper. Got to make them think we believe. Then we'll have ourselves a real solemn funeral out to the graveyard near 92nd Street. Know a preacher who'll wring every last tear out of all of us. I mean all. We'll all go. The Kopaks, the Schwartz's, the Peters, everyone who heard in on the short-wave about Freddie and how he's alive and everything. The sadder we look, the happier we'll feel later on. Then we'll have ourselves a real old fashioned celebration, like before the Karadi came. ”

“ Davidson know, anyway, listening to his subversive radio? Why should the barbarians in the mountains tell the truth any more than the Karadi or their agents? The barbarians are our enemies. It's propaganda. Maybe Mr. Davidson is a saboteur for them.
"Is that clear?" Mr. Friedlander demanded. "Is that quite, quite clear? Cry if you want. Freddie is dead. Freddie is dead. Dead. You can't believe all the wild stories you hear."
Mrs. Friedlander was smiling at him through her tears, wiping them away, assuming again the Oriental pose. "You believe what you want," she said. "We won't celebrate. ”

“ If you loved someone, your son, all his life and then a stranger came and said he was dead you could forget the stranger came and go on thinking of that someone, your son, alive and not dead, but too busy to come and see you, eating the food you could only dream about, sleeping in a warm bed, in some clean place far away. ”

“ We must put an announcement in the Karadi newspaper and make plans for a funeral."
"In all this snow? It's so cold."
"Anyway."
Mrs. Friedlander walked to the stove and stirred the bubbling turnip water. "You come and eat your supper," she said. "We'll talk about Freddie later."
"There's nothing to talk about. Only the funeral."
"Maybe he was lying. The stranger."
"Stop that. It's what they want. They want us to be animals. They want us never to know. Always doubting. Always clean in dirty places, working hard, using all our energy to be only a little better than animals. ”

“ Friedlander. Those Karadi ain't here to stay. If you stopped to think of it a minute, you'd understand like the rest of us."
"The rest of you?"
"Well, a lot of us, anyway. They don't need us. We have nothing they want. They enjoy making us knuckle under, is all. Something in their makeup, I don't know what. They won't stay here forever, though some of us won't be around long enough to see them go."
"What's all that got to do with...?"
"With Freddie and the short-wave? He's been captured, Mr. Friedlander! By the free folk. He's on their side now, the side all of us want to be on but can't be. ”

“ Friedlander," he said, his voice like the dimly remembered taste of pure maple syrup, "I bring you the heartfelt sympathies of the Karadi Newspaper. If it is any consolation, know that your son, Freddie Friedlander, Jr., died a hero's death against the barbarians of the mountains." His nose was running with the cold; he padded it daintily with a pale blue silk handkerchief. He offered Mr. Friedlander a small, dry-crackling cigar, took one himself and touched flame to them with a monogramed lighter. Mr. ”