The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Twenty-three

The metals-storage unit of Masenvale was a windowless concrete box surrounded by a high, static-charged fence and lit at night by floodlights that showed the fortified gatehouse and the heavy locked entrance doors stark against the surrounding darkness. It stood alone, in the warm, lowland spring night following the one on which the trucks had arrived at the Mohler-Beni farm, surrounded by a square, two business blocks from the District Militia Headquarters, in the downtown area of this middle-sized city. The relative darkness inside the windowed gatehouse made the man on guard there invisible to the twelve members of the Command who had been driven to the edge of the square by the man who owned the accordion. He had parked the vehicle around the corner from the square in the shadows between two floating street lights; and his passengers, Hal among them, had quietly slipped out of the van into the shadows, and were now gathered just behind the corner of a building facing on the square. The driver had remained with the truck, the vehicle facing away from the scene, his motor switch on warm, with his finger on the switch and the idle position only a finger-twitch away.

The metals unit and its surrounding fence slept in the unchanging pattern of light and shadow. Beyond its front gates and the gatehouse, the concrete surface of the square graded back into the darker shadow of the building, behind a corner of which they stood.

Hal felt a loosening of the muscles of his shoulders and the coolness of the night air being pulled deep into his lungs; and recognized the adaptations of the body to the expectation of possible conflict. A calmness and a detachment seemed, for the first time, to have come over him from the same source. He looked about for Jason, caught the eye of the smaller man, and led the way out into the square. Talking in low voices, apparently immersed in their conversation, the two of them started across the square on a slant that would take them past the front of the static-charged fence with its gate and gatehouse, guarding the unit.

As they moved down alongside the fence past the gatehouse, Hal was just able to make out through one of its windows the peaked cap of the single civilian guard seated within at his desk. Hal slowed his step, Jason slowed with him, and eventually they came to a halt just outside the gates themselves, apparently deep in conversation.

They talked on, their voices so low that their words would not have been understandable unless a listener was standing almost within arm's length of them. They stood, centimeters from the fence with its static charge that would be released at any contact to stun, if not kill, whoever had touched the metal of the fence. Time went on. After a while, the door to the guardhouse opened and the guard stuck his head out.

"You two out there!" he called. "You can't stand there. Move on!"

Hal and Jason ignored him.

"Did you hear me? Move on!"

They continued to ignore him.

Boots thumping loudly on the three steps down from the gatehouse door to the concrete of the square, the guard came out. The door slammed loudly behind him. He came up to the fence, careless about touching his side of it; for any touch from within deactivated the mechanism producing the static charge.

"Did you hear me?" His voice came loudly at them through the wide openings in the wire mesh, from less than an arm's length away. "Both of you - move on before I call Militia HQ to come pick you up for disturbance!"

Still they acted as if he was not there. He stepped right up against the fence, grabbed the wire and shouted at them; and as he did so, they stepped away, back along it on their side.

"What's going on here - " the guard began.

He did not finish. There was a distant, twanging noise, a hum in the air, and a second later a crossbow bolt with a blunt and padded head flickered into the lights to strike the side of the guard's head with the impact of a blackjack. The man slumped against the fence and began to sag down it toward the concrete; and, reaching swiftly through a couple of the wide mesh spaces, Hal caught and held him, upright but unconscious, against the fence.

With the fence registering an upright and still-living body pressed against its inner surface, its static charge was quiescent. Reaching through it, past Hal's straining shoulder-muscles, Jason unclipped the picture-crowned identity badge of the guard from the left pocket of his uniform jacket, and carried it over to the sensor plate in the right-hand gatepost. He pressed the face of the badge against the plate. There was a slight pause and then, recognizing the badge, the gates swung smoothly and quietly open.

Jason dodged through and put his hand against the interior control plate on the back of the same gatepost. He held it there and the gates stayed open. Hal let go of the guard, who slid down to lie still at the foot of the fence.

Jason went swiftly to stand at one side of the closed doors of the building, drawing a handgun from under his shirt as he did so. Hal came around to pick up the guard, take him into the gatehouse and immobilize him there with tape and a gag. The other ten Command members flooded smoothly across the square and through the open gate of the fence - which the last of them closed behind him.

Hal came out of the gatehouse, carrying the sidearm from the leg holster of the once more conscious, but trussed and now-undressed, guard. He handed the clothes to the member of the Command they seemed most likely to fit and the man who had taken them put them on, pulling the cap low over his eyes. Tilting his head down to pull his face back into the deep shadow below the visor of the uniform hat, the spurious guard stood directly before the sensor plate to the right of the doors blocking out its view of anything else and pressed the doorcall button.

There was a second's wait.

"Jarvy?" said a voice from a speaker panel above the plate.

The uniformed member grunted wordlessly, still holding his head down.

"What?" demanded the speaker panel.

The spurious guard grunted again.

"I can't hear you, Jarvy - what is it?"

The member said nothing, still looking down with his face in shadow.

"Just a minute," said the speaker panel. "There's something wrong with the voice pickup out there - "

The two doors swung open in neat mechanical unison. Framed in the white glare of illumination from the interior of the metals unit stood another guard, peering out into the darkness.

"Jarvy, what - " he began; and then he went down, silenced by hands on his mouth and throat even as he fell under the unified rush of several bodies.

"Where's the metals room?" Jason asked Hal, soft-voiced.

"Straight back," answered Hal, an image of the plan of the unit's interior which Rukh had shown him clear in his memory. He pointed along the hand-truck-wide corridor they had just entered. "But the guard-office's to the right. You'd better wait until we clear that."

Jason nodded and fell back. Hal, with two other men and three women of the Command, all armed now with handguns produced from within their clothing, went swiftly and quietly ahead down the corridor and burst in through the first door to their right, which was standing ajar. But inside there was only a single other guard, sitting on a cot at one end of a small room filled with surveillance screens, a power rifle on his knees.

At the sight of them he stared - grasped the rifle as if he would swing it up into firing position, then dropped it as if it had burned his fingers. Going forward before the protection of the handguns those behind him held levelled on the man, Hal picked up the power rifle and found it, not broken open for cleaning as he had expected, but loaded and ready to use.

"What were you going to do with it?" Hal asked the guard.

"Nothing…" The guard stared up at him, hopelessly, with frightened eyes.

"How many other people on duty here, now?" Hal loomed over him.

"Just Ham - just Ham and me, and Jarvy on the gate!" said the guard. He was white-faced and shock was losing out to fear.

"How do you unlock the metals room?"

"We can't," said the guard. "Really - we can't. They don't let us. It's a time lock on the door."

Hal looked down at him through a long moment of silence.

"I'm going to ask you again," he said. "This time, forget what they told you to say. How do you open the metals room door?"

The guard stared up at him.

"You're the man they're looking for so hard, aren't you?" he blurted out.

"Never mind that," said Hal. "The door to the metals room - ?"

"I - code KJ9R on the control keyboard - " The guard nodded almost eagerly toward the other side of the room. "The one under the large screen, there. That's the truth, that really opens it."

"We know." Hal smiled at him. "I was just checking. Lie down where you are, now, and we'll tie you up. You won't be hurt."

The other Command members with him converged on the guard; and Hal took the power rifle with him as he went back toward the door. As they began to tie the man up, he stepped to the screen the guard had indicated and keyed in the code the man had given. Rukh had explained to him that the Commands normally had little trouble finding out ahead of time the information they would need for raids on places such as this; but it was the practice to always check such information when that was possible. Holding the power rifle, he went back out to the corridor.

"The metals door ought to be open now," he told a senior member of the Command, a man named Heidrick Falt. "The guard gave me the same code Rukh had."

Falt nodded, his eyes thoughtful upon Hal. Falt had been named group leader for this raid. Rukh's instructions had been to let Hal lead only on the way in. As far as Hal could tell, Falt had not resented that exception to his authority; but it was a relief to hand the command back to the other man, now.

"Good," said Falt. He had a reedy voice too young for his face and body. "We'll start to load up. You go back and sit with the driver."

"Right." Hal nodded.

He left the building. Outside, the square showed no change. It still seemed to slumber under the same lights and shadows as before; and from the outside the metals unit sat with the same air of impregnability it had seemed to wear earlier. He turned the corner, reached the truck and climbed back into the cab. In the small interior glow of the instrument panel the driver turned a round face toward him in which there was no hint of friendliness.

"Ready to go?" he said.

"A while yet," Hal answered.

For a moment he played with the idea of trying to break through the shell of enmity in which the other had encased himself. Then he put the thought aside. The driver was too tense to be reached at this moment. The concern here was not with how much he might fear and dislike Hal but with whether, as not infrequently happened with local volunteers, his nerve might snap with the waiting, causing him to drive off and leave the raiding party stranded. It was to guard against this that Falt had sent Hal back here. The less said between the two of them right now, the better.

They sat, and the minutes crawled by. The driver shifted position from time to time, sighed, rubbed his nose, looked out of the window then back at the instrument panel, and made a dozen other small movements and sounds. Hal sat still and silent, as he had been taught to do under such conditions, deliberately removing a part of his attention from the present moment and reaching out into the abstract universe of the mind. In the present semi-suspended state of consciousness that resulted, it seemed to him that he could almost feel beside him the presence of Rukh, who would now be at the fertilizer area. He felt her as if she was both there, and here with him at the same moment. It was an eerie but powerful sensation; and a poem began to shape itself about it, in the back of his thoughts.

And if it should not be you, after all -

Down the long passage, turning in the hall;

Or slipping at a distance through the light

Of streetlamped corners just within my sight;

I will not then turn back into my room,

Chilled and disheartened wrapped in angry gloom;

But warm myself to think the mind should send

So many shades of you to be my friend …

The poem disturbed him. It was not right, somehow. It was too light and facile, not cast in the way he normally thought or had been taught to think. But at the same time it rang with a sense of something discovered he had not known before. It seemed to echo off things completely removed from his present reality, things half-hidden in corners and cul-de-sacs of personal pain that he had never known and could not now remember - lonelinesses that had no proper part of life as he now knew it. For a moment, something moved far back in his mind; he seemed to feel an echoing, down endless centuries of moments such as this, in all of which he now remembered being isolated and set apart from others. Uneasily, he pushed the memories from him. But they returned, along with barely-registered sensations of pains he did not remember ever feeling, as if he had known them all, and been the one within them all…

The door to the cab opened. Falt looked inside.

"Open the back doors," he said. "We're coming in."

The driver touched a control stud on his instrument panel. Behind them they heard the doors trundle apart. Hal moved back from the cab section into the body of the van to help with the loading of whatever metal the Command had lifted from the unit.

"What are they?" he asked, as heavy, smooth gray ingots began to be passed in to him by those standing on the pavement outside the doors. "What did you bring?"

"High-tin solder," panted Jason, passing in his personal burden. "About forty ingots all told. Not too much to carry, but it ought to convince the authorities this was what we were actually after and the fertilizer warehouse business was the diversion."

Taking and stacking the ingots, Hal put the poem and the ghost memories firmly from him. He was back now in the ordinary universe, where things were as hard and heavy and real as the ingots of solder.

They finished loading and drove off. Falt took over the passenger seat in the cab, but kept Hal there to talk to him as they went.

"I think we ought to head for the foothills, without trying to rendezvous with the rest at the fertilizer warehouse," Falt said. "What do you think?"

"And give up the idea of splitting the metal up among the other trucks, so that if we lose a truck or two, we don't lose it all?"

"That's secondary," said Falt. "You know that. Our whole raid was secondary to the fertilizer raid; and we took longer than Rukh estimated to get things done here. No, the main thing is to get as many of us as possible safely back to the Command. I think the hills are safer."

"A dozen people on foot," Hal said, "won't be able to move very far or fast with all those ingots, once we leave the truck. We've gotten away clear. No one's chasing us; and if the rest of you left those guards tied up right it could be hours before the alarm goes out on what we did. I'd say make the rendezvous."

Falt had been sitting sideways on the seat to look back at Hal, now squatting on the small space of open floor in the cab behind both seats. At Hal's answer, Falt turned his head back to look out the windshield of the truck. They were skimming at good speed above the concrete strip of one of the main routes radiating from the center of the city.

"We must be halfway to the fertilizer warehouse now - isn't that right, driver?" said Hal.

There was a slight pause.

''Almost," said the driver, slowly.

Falt looked over at him.

"You'd rather head for the foothills now?" he asked.

"Yes!" The answer was explosive.

"We don't know what's happened at the fertilizer area," Hal said. "They could need another truck and the help of the extra dozen of us."

Falt blew out a short breath, staring through the windshield again. Then he looked first back at Hal, then at the driver.

"All right," he said. "That's where we'll go."

When they got to the turnoff from the route that was closest to the fertilizer plant, there was a redness to be seen above the skyline of buildings to their left.

"The place could be swarming with Militia already," said the driver.

"Just go there." Falt said.

The driver obeyed. Less than two minutes brought them around the corner of a tall lightless office building and the driver brought the truck to a halt.

Ahead of them was a fenced-in area that looked as if it might encompass several city blocks. Within the fence was one tall, almost windowless cube of a concrete building, and several other long, wide concrete structures with curved roofs like sections of barrels laid lengthwise over the rectangular blocks beneath. One of these was aflame at its far end; and lights and alarm bells within that or other buildings could be heard shrilling in the distance. Beyond two truck-wide gates in the fence, now gaping wide open, the dark shapes of the other van-type trucks the Command had brought stood outlined against the light of the burning structure.

"They're still there," said Hal.

"Go in," said Falt to the driver.

"No," said the driver. "I'm staying here where I can make a run for it. You go in on foot if you want."

Falt drew a sidearm from under his shirt and held the muzzle against the driver's right temple.

"Go in," he said.

The driver started up the truck once more. They drove in. As they got closer to the trucks, a scene of ordered confusion became visible between and about them. Most of the members of the Command were engaged in the carrying of twenty-five kilogram bags of fertilizer on their shoulders, from a stack of them outside the burning building to the vans of individual trucks. The body of a man lay before the firelit front end of one of the trucks; and in the center of the activity stood Rukh, directing it.

Hal and the others left their truck; and, with Falt, Hal came up to Rukh. The rest of their team went unordered to the necessary business of loading sacks of fertilizer into their own truck.

As he and Falt got close to Rukh, Hal saw her for a moment outlined against the red light of the fire. It was as if she stood darkly untouched in the heart of the flames. Then someone passed beyond her with a sack over her shoulder and the illusion was lost. As they came up, she turned, saw them, and spoke without waiting.

"We've got three wounded," she told Falt. "No one killed; and we've chased off the district police for the moment. They'll be back shortly with help, so I'm going to have you take those three and whatever you've already got loaded and leave for the rendezvous ahead of the rest of us. They're all three in Tallah's truck, right now. Send six of your people to carry them over. How'd you do?"

"No one even hurt," said Falt. "Typical small-city guards. Not like Militia at all. They practically rolled over and put their paws in the air for us."

"Good," said Rukh. "Get moving, then. We've cut alarm communications and some of the local people are helping to contain information on the fact we're here; but I don't estimate more than another fifteen minutes before we've got Militia around our ears. Howard, if for any reason the wounded have to split off from the rest, you're to stay with them."

"Right," said Hal.