The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Twenty-four

He and Falt went back to the truck. Falt began reassigning members of their team, as they returned laden, to the job of bringing over the three wounded. Once a sufficient number had been sent, he put the rest as they came in to passing over to other trucks as many of the ingots as could be moved before the three casualties were brought. Five minutes later, they were out of the gates and leaving the red glow behind them; the dark ribbon of the route unwinding before the nose of their truck and the dark shapes of the foothills and further mountains rising on the night horizon under the still starlit sky. The new moon had not yet put in its appearance.

Once more Falt took the cab seat beside the driver. Hal went back into the body of the van to look at the wounded. One was Morelly Walden; and in the dim interior of the van with its single dim, overhead light, the lines and creases in the heavy face appeared deeper; so that he seemed to have aged another ten years at least into the realm of the truly old.

"It's his leg," said Joralmon Troy, looking up from where he sat cross-legged beside Morelly's stretcher, perched on its low, dark pile of fertilizer bags. "When we blew out the door of the warehouse, a big piece got him in the leg and broke it."

"Did they give you anything for the pain?" Hal asked Morelly, reading the deepness of the facial creases.

"No," said Morelly, hoarsely. "No sinful drugs."

Hal hesitated.

"If you like," he said, "there's a way I could massage your forehead and neck to help relieve the pain."

"No," said Morelly, effortfully. "The pain is by God's will. I'll bear it as His Warrior."

Hal touched him gently on the shoulder and went to look at the other two casualties, a woman who had taken a weapon burn in her right shoulder, superficial but painful, and a man who had been needled in the chest. Both these other two were unconscious, under sedation.

"We're low on painkillers," murmured one of the women who was sitting beside the stretchers of these other casualties. "Morelly knows it. He's really not that much of an old prophet."

Hal nodded.

"I thought so," he answered in an equally low voice. He turned and went back toward the cab. All three would have to be carried. That meant that if he and they split off from the others, he would have at least a party of nine under his responsibility. By the time he got to the cab, the route as seen through the windshield had narrowed down until there was room only for four vehicles abreast; and the exits were no longer ramps, but simple turnoffs. Falt had unfolded his copy of Rukh's local map, which had been issued to all the group leaders, and was looking at it in the overhead light of the cab. Ahead, beyond the mountains, the stars were beginning to be lost in a sky paling toward the dawn.

"Look here," said Falt to Hal, as Hal squatted behind his seat. "Standing orders are that any groups with wounded take priority on the safer rendezvous points over any groups without injured. Since we're the only such group - so far, anyway - that moves us from our prearranged point to this one - "

His finger indicated a starred position higher in the foothills than any others marked there.

"We ought to find more than enough donkeys waiting at that point to carry the light load we've got and sling the stretchers between a pair of beasts apiece." He turned from the map to look at the driver. "How long before we get there?"

"Maybe ten, fifteen - " the driver broke off with a grunt. They had just come around a long curve, and he was staring ahead out the windshield. His face had paled, his knuckles gleamed above the steering wheel in the glow from the instrument panel.

Hal and Falt turned to look as he was looking. Ahead - far ahead on the now-straight route - but unmistakable, were lights set up to shine on a barricade closing the road.

"God save us," whispered the driver. "I can't turn back. They've seen us by now…"

"Drive through," said Falt.

"I can't," the driver answered. He was sweating and he had eased off on the thumb-button on the wheel that controlled the throttle. They were slowing gradually, but still approaching the barricade up ahead far too swiftly for anyone's comfort. "They'll have pylons set up beyond the barricade to turn us over if I try it."

He stared at Falt.

"What're they doing out here?" His face turned back over its shoulder to look at Hal. "It's your fault! They don't know anything about the raid - they couldn't! They're out here looking for you - and now they've got us!"

The truck was close enough now so that they could pick out figures in the black uniforms of the Militia on either side of the barricade.

"Go around, then," said Falt.

"The minute I try that, they'll start shooting!" The driver's face was agonized. "God save us! God save us - "

Falt took his sidearm from his shirt again.

"Go around," he said, softly. "It's the only way."

The driver threw a quick glance at the weapon.

"If you shoot me at this speed, we'll all crash," he said bitterly.

Hal put his right hand up with the thumb on one side of the back of the driver's neck, his fingers on the other. He exerted pressure and the driver made a small sound.

"When I snap his spine," said Hal to Falt, "you take the wheel."

"I'll go - I'll go around," husked the driver. Hal released the pressure on the other's neck but kept his fingers in place.

"At the last moment, only," Falt said to the driver. "I'll tell you when to leave the road. Hold steady, now… hold steady… now!"

At the last moment the barricade had seemed to jump at them. The Militia on either side of it had been waving their arms for some time to command the vehicle to a halt.

"Hit it! Up the speed! Hit it - now!" Falt was shouting at the driver.

But the driver had already dug his finger into the throttle button and the truck was off the road and sliding in a tilted curve over the open ground alongside it like a saucer being sailed into a strong wind. Its body rang as power weapons struck the skin of the van with energy bolts that generated explosions of high temperature in the material. The windshield and the window on the driver's side starred suddenly, as if hit by solid birdshot; and the driver cried out, his hands flying up from the wheel. Falt grabbed the wheel and pulled the truck, skittering, back onto the route beyond the barricade and the sharp-pointed pylons anchored in concrete just beyond. His finger pressed down the throttle again, and abruptly they were flying up the route once more, while the barricade, the figures and the pylons behind it dwindled rapidly in the distance.

The driver was huddled against the cab door at his side.

"Where are you hit?" Falt was demanding.

"Oh God!" said the driver. "Oh God - oh God…"

"Howard," said Falt, "take a look at this man, find out where he's hit and lift him over the back of the seat, out of my way, if you can."

Hal stood up, holding to the back of the seat before him and bent over the driver, reaching down to pull him back from the door. A fingernail-sized stain was visible high on the left side of the driver's shirt. Pressing the cloth tight against the man's body as he went, Hal felt for and found wetness on the man's back at a roughly opposite point, then ran his hands over the shirt and the upper areas of the driver's pants, as far as he could reach, bending over the driver as he was.

"Are your legs all right?" he asked the driver.

"Oh, God…"

Hal put his hand gently once more on the man's neck.

"Yes - yes," the driver almost yelped. "They're all right! My legs are all right!"

"You got a single needle through your left shoulder, high up," Hal told him. "It's nothing serious. Now…"

He massaged the back of the other's neck.

"Now, I'm going to help you up over the back of your seat. I want you to do as much as you can to get over, yourself. Come on, now…"

He reached down with both hands and put them under the driver's armpits. He lifted. The driver scrambled upwards with both arms and legs. Abruptly he screamed and tried to slide back down into the seat again; but Hal held him and half-pulled, half-lifted him over the back of the seat by sheer force. The driver screamed again as the back of his knees bumped over the back of the seat.

"My leg! My leg - oh, God!"

But Hal, with the other already on the floor on his back behind the seats, was checking a stain on the outside of the other's left leg, just above the knee.

"Looks like you've got a needle through the leg, too," he said. "Can you bend it?"

The driver tried and did, but screamed a third time.

"Looks like that one could be more serious," said Hal. "The needle's hit something in there."

He felt under the leg.

"And it looks as if it's still in there."

"Oh God - "

"He's faking," said Falt clearly. "There's no way it could be hurting him that much."

Hal put a hand over the man's mouth.

"You've got a choice," he said quietly in the other's ear. "Now I know and you know how that leg of yours hurts. But we also both know it only hurts when you move it; and that you should move it as little as possible. Neither wound is going to kill you. So, lie still; and either you keep quiet or I'll have to make sure you're quiet because you're unconscious. Do you understand?"

Part of his mind was appalled at what he was saying; but another part nodded in bleak approval at this evidence of how well he had learned his lessons once upon a time. For a moment he could almost imagine the harsh, old bass voice of Malachi Nasuno echoing behind his own. He had spoken the words he had just said as if he had read them off a blackboard in Malachi's mind.

But the results were successful. The driver now lay motionless and silent. Hal stood up, clinging to the back of the seat before him; and saw that Falt was now behind the wheel and holding the truck steady as it fled.

"Pick up the map and navigate," said Falt.

Hal slipped around into the empty seat Falt had vacated. He picked up the map from the cab floor before the seat.

"Are we still on the route?" he asked, glancing ahead through the windshield, for what he looked out on was now a two-lane roadway of crushed gravel.

"No. Two turns off. Local Way Ten - find it there?"

Hal looked.

"Yes," he said. "We turn off Way Ten on to Way One Hundred Twenty-three, and off that on to Demming Road - follow Demming Road to the first path, unnamed, turning off to the right. We make a ninety degree left turn off that path after one point eight kilometers, and take out over open country. We go on a compass reading of forty-three minutes, twenty-four seconds, for point six of one kilometer, and that brings us to the gathering point."

"All right," said Falt. "Now direct me."

They continued according to the directions Hal had spelled out, as the sky brightened above them and the open woods along the back country roads began to emerge into visibility from the solid blackness that had earlier held everything beyond the cast of the truck's lights. Hal glanced back once to check on the driver, who had been silent all this time, and saw him still as he had been, lying on his side with his eyes closed - either unconscious or determined to attract no further attention to himself.

They came to the gathering point finally in the first somber light of the dawn; by then the whole woods was visible around them, although the sun was still hidden behind the mountains to their right. Waiting for them there, shielded from telescopic observation by a tight clump of variform elms, was a pile of packsaddles and related equipment surrounded by fifteen placid donkeys, tethered to the surrounding tree trunks or limbs. There was no one with them. The local farmers were clearly willing to donate their livestock, but only at minimum risk to themselves.

The truck halted. Falt punched the button to open the back doors. He and Hal, with the rest of the team, got out of the truck and began the process of getting the wounded onto their stretchers, once each of these had been slung between two of the donkeys, and loading the remaining animals with the bags of fertilizer as well as the ingots of high-tin solder, which would be cut up and used as payment for equipment the Command would not be able to get by donation along the way.

They were finishing this when a wild voice shouted at them.

"That's right - go off and leave me to die!"

They all looked toward the sound of it. In one of the cab doorways, the driver lay propped on one elbow, the closure of his shirt pulled open halfway by his effort to crawl there, his eyes bloodshot and face contorted. Without a glance at each other, both Falt and Hal walked over to the cab, while the rest of the team turned back to getting the donkey train ready to move out.

"That's right," said the driver in a lower voice, as they came up to him. He glared at them, his face above the floor of the cab on a level with theirs as they stood outside it. "Leave me here, all shot up. Leave me here to die."

"You can drive," said Falt, flatly. "It'll hurt some, but I've seen Command members drive half a day in worse shape than you are."

"And what'll happen when I get home - if I get home?" the driver demanded. "Because if they've got one roadblock up here, they've got a dozen; and now they'll be looking for this truck after we went around them the way you did! Even if I could get past the roadblocks, even if I could get home, could I go to my family, knowing the Militia'll be searching everywhere and what'd happen to my people if I was found at the farm? Do you think I'm the kind to go back and let them in for that?"

"You can't come with us," said Falt. "What else is there for you?"

The driver stared at him for a moment, breathing raggedly.

"There's a place in the mountains I could go," he said, more quietly. "But I can't make it alone."

"I tell you, you can drive, if you want to," said Falt.

"I can drive!" shouted the driver at him. "I can drive on a road. I can drive a little ways like this is, from a road. But I can't take this truck ten kilometers back into the woods when I might get jammed between trees or hung up on a rock, or turned over at any minute - and what'd happen to me then? Could I crawl the rest of the way to the cabin?"

"Some might," said Falt, dryly. But he looked at Hal with a small frown line between his eyes.

"I'll take him to his cabin," said Hal.

"We can't spare you," said Falt.

"No reason why not," Hal said. "There's no pursuit at the moment. You've got more than enough beasts and the rest of the team's in good shape. I can drive him to his place, and still make it to rendezvous not more than a couple of hours behind the rest of you."

Falt hesitated. Hal turned to the driver.

"This cabin of yours," he said. "What's it doing away off like that, by itself?"

"It's a fishing cabin." The driver lowered his eyes. "All right, there's some fishing up here, but not much. It's mainly a place a few of us go just to get away."

"How few of you? How many know about this place?"

The driver's eyes came up again, defiantly.

"Me, my two next brothers and my cousin Joab," he said. "We all live at home together. The Militia couldn't make any of them say anything, anyway. Besides, when I don't come back, they'll think to look for me up there, in a day or two."

"How far from here is it?" he asked. "How long to get there in your truck?"

"Half an hour." The voice of the driver was now eager. "Just half an hour, and no danger of running into Militia, I swear it."

"So you'd swear, would you?" said Falt, looking at him, disgust in the older Command member's voice.

The driver colored and looked down at the floor of the cab.

"I only meant…"

Hal looked back at Falt.

"There's no reason I can't take him and meet you all at rendezvous."

Falt sighed hissingly, between closed teeth.

"Take him then." He turned his back on the driver. "Don't take any risks for him. He's not worth it."

He walked away.

"Move back," said Hal to the driver. "Let me in."

Grunting with pain at each movement of his leg, the other pulled back away from the cab doorway. Hal hoisted himself up inside and took the seat behind the controls. He closed the cab doors, switched the motors from warm to idle, and lifted the truck on its travelling cushion of air from the blowers. Turning the vehicle, he waved through the windshield at the rest of the team who were now watching him, and drove off, toward the road. Behind him there was a good deal of scrabbling and grunting, and the driver at last hauled himself up into the empty seat alongside Hal.

"Which way?" asked Hal, as they came to the road.

"Left."

They turned on to the road, headed deeper into the foothills, toward the mountains. Hal followed the monosyllabic directions through several turns and changes of roads; and very shortly they were climbing steeply up a track that was hardly more than a donkey-trail. He had expected them to turn off even from this, but instead the track itself came to an end.

"Where now?" Hal asked, seeing the end of the trail approaching.

"Straight ahead for now. Then I'll tell you."

Hal glanced over at the other man as he followed this latest direction. The driver's face as he stared ahead out the windshield was tight-skinned, his jaws clamped, his eyes hooded and sullen.

"Left now," he said. They went a short distance. "Now, right again, between those two large trees and to the left of that boulder. Slow down. The spring thaw makes rocks roll down, and we can run right on top of one of those and get hung up or flipped over before we know it."

Hal drove. The directions continued. After a short while they came through an opening in some bushes and into a small depression through which a stream ran - a stream too small for fish of reasonable size, but sufficient to provide drinking and washing water for the rather clumsy log cabin with a single drunken eye of a window in its front wall that had been thrown up beside it.

"Here," said the driver.

Hal stopped the truck. He got out and went around to open the other door of the cab and help the driver out. For a Harmonyite who would not curse, he did a good job of expressing his dissatisfaction with the help he was being given.

"… Careful! Can't you be more careful?" he snapped.

"Want to try it on your own?" Hal said. "I can leave you just where you are, here, outside the cabin."

The driver became silent. Hal half-carried, half-supported the man in a hopping progress toward the door of the cabin, through it and into the interior - an untidy area of portable camp beds, a woodbox stove, and a large, round table with four chairs, that looked out of place in these surroundings.

"What's the table for - card games?" asked Hal.

The driver flashed a sudden glance that showed a good deal of the whites of the other's eyes; and suddenly Hal realized that by accident he had named the real reason for the existence of the cabin. He aided the driver to one of the camp beds and the driver collapsed on it.

"Is there something clean around here I can fill with water to leave with you?" Hal said. "And what have you got, a privy somewhere out back? How far is it? By tomorrow you're literally going to have to crawl to get anywhere. You don't have some kind of bucket I can get to put by your bed?"

"There's a water bucket to the left of the stove," said the driver sullenly. "And there's a compression toilet under the canvas groundcloth in the corner. Get my accordion."

"All right. I'll move the toilet over by your cot," said Hal. He did so, went out to fill the bucket and brought it back full with a dipper floating in it, to put it by the bedside. "Now, what about food? Have you got any food here?"

"There's another box on the far side of the stove," said the driver, sullenly. "You can bring that over. It's got boxed stuff that keeps in it. You can get some more blankets, too, from the other beds. It gets cold up here, nights."

"All right," said Hal. He did so. "Have you got any medical supplies up here?"

"Emergency kit's around here someplace," said the driver. "You'll have to look for it."

It took eight to ten minutes of searching before Hal came up with the kit. He took it back to the driver, cleaned and spot-bandaged the needle-holes in the man.

"You said the needle's still in my leg," said the other, suddenly fearful as Hal was doing this. "What'll it do? What's going to happen to me?"

Hal had to stop and think back to what Malachi had told him.

"If you left it there indefinitely," he said, "either your body'd build some kind of shielding tissue around it, or it'd work its way out, eventually - maybe a few years from now. Unless it carried some material in with it, like dirty clothing, it probably won't infect; and gun needles generally don't, because their sharpness sends them through things a slug from missile weapons might push ahead of it into the wound it makes. You'll still want to get it taken out of your leg as soon as you can."

He considered the man for a moment.

"You'll be all right for a few days, in any case."

"But I mean - " The driver broke off. The now-strong daylight, coming through the drunken window-eye to push apart the shadows of the cabin's interior, showed his face both crafty and pale. "You're going to leave me something for the pain, aren't you?"

"Sorry," said Hal. "I've got nothing to give you."

"What do you mean?" the driver's voice rose. "I saw you put your stuff into the truck. You've got to have painkillers in that med kit in your pack - I know all you Command people carry them for when you get wounded! You've got some and you can give me some!"

Hal thought of Morelly, with the old lines of his face deepened as he lay on the stretcher.

"We carry that sort of thing not for ourselves," he said, "but for our brothers and sisters in battle when the time comes that they need it. It's not for you, even if you had to have it - which you don't."

He turned and went out the door to the truck. He opened its rear doors and, gathering his equipment, began to pack it and put it on. As he did there was a sound from the door of the cabin. Glancing over, he saw that the driver had managed to pull himself as far as the doorway to stand propped up there.

"I suppose you think I owe you some thanks?" the driver shouted. "Well, I don't! It's all right when our own people want to fight the Militia, but you don't even belong. You with your foreign accent and your pretending to help! What did you do to make them hunt you like that? You made all the trouble. Everybody who got hurt in this got hurt because they were already looking for you! I've got these needles in me because of you - just you. And you think I'm going to thank you? I wouldn't thank you for anything. You know what I say? I say damn on you! Yes, you heard me - I say the damnation in God's name upon you…"

He was still shouting as Hal closed the rear truck doors and turned about, fully outfitted at last in his gear, and went away from stream and cabin into the woods. He heard the driver's shouting continue for some distance after he was obviously out of sight. There was a heaviness and a bitterness in him that would not be gotten rid of; even though he exercised his mind as Walter the InTeacher had taught him, to put aside the anger that had surged up in him at the last words of the man behind him. Walking steadily south through the mountain woods, it occurred to him with a touch of wonder that when he had explained to the other why he could not give painkillers to him, he had thought and spoken unconsciously, for the first time in his life, as a Friendly. The thought suddenly wiped clean from him the heaviness and bitterness triggered by the reactions of the driver; the sadness in him that such as Rukh and Morelly - and Child-of-God - should pay the price of the life they had chosen for someone who understood and valued that price so little.

For a little while, he walked through the morning-lit woods, bemused by this new development within him. He had imitated Obadiah, but until now he never reacted in his own right as a Friendly. Like the slow but powerful effects of some heavy shock, he felt an understanding of this stern culture flooding through him - an understanding he had never had before. But even as he realized this, he understood further that he had only begun to grasp that understanding, that he must be content to wait now, to put it aside to be wrestled with at some other opportunity, when the first heavy effects of it would have been absorbed enough to make it possible to stand back and look at the shape of this new comprehension that had just come to him, in detail.

He came finally out into what he had been searching for, an open spot on the mountainside where he could overlook all the foothills and the area beyond where the city of Masenvale sprawled. He glanced down the flank of the earth on which he stood and saw the dished-in, downward swoop of forested slopes that seemed to march to the very edge of the dark oval that was the city. He reached into his pack, took out the field viewer there, and put it to his eye, dialing it into focus on one point, then setting it on automatic adjustment as he swung about to survey the lower area.

With no great difficulty, he picked out the still-smoking fertilizer storage area, then traced the route he and the others had taken in the truck until he came to the point where the barricade still stood. Taking the viewer off automatic to put it on full magnification, he saw that a second row of barricades had been set up on the other side of the pylons they had passed and that the dark-uniformed figures seemed to be keeping a watch now in both directions, instead of merely toward anyone coming out from the city. Beyond this change, the barrier looked as if it had never been encountered - except for a curve of flattened roadside weeds and other small growth that marked the track of the fans of their truck where they had swung out around it; and the addition of a troop carrier truck, that now stood by the far side of the road, looking as if ready to move at a second's notice.

He moved the viewer on, and found the gathering point where he had parted with the rest of the team. The back of his mind, trained early to remember such things, threw up a perfect image of the map he had held to navigate Falt to that point; and he swung the viewer to check the other gathering points that had been marked on it. All but two were now empty of donkeys and equipment; and neither of the teams now loading up in them had Rukh among them.

He began to search forward along the routes he estimated each team would take from the gathering points to the rendezvous deep in the foothills. Once they were under the trees there, of course, he would not be able to see them. He located more than half of the teams, including his own; but was still not able to find the one Rukh was with, although he located the one led by Child. All the teams he could see were close upon the foothills. It looked as if everyone had gotten away safely, he thought; and then a movement on the traffic ways farther down the slope caught his eye as he panned the viewer about.

Focusing in, he located a column of six troop carriers, raising a faint plume of dust along one of the gravel-surfaced Ways as it headed in at an angle to the foothills some kilometers ahead of the rendezvous. Panning the field viewer backwards along the slope, he found three more plumes of dust and focused in on three more columns of carriers. He stood watching them through the viewer. There was no point in their moving in on the foothills in force that way unless the carriers were loaded with armed Militia; and the organization of the pursuit he now saw testified either to the fact that columns and their personnel had been waiting on a standby basis, or that the Militia had been informed of the fertilizer and metals raids ahead of time.

But they could not have been informed ahead of time; not only because of the unlikelihood of anyone connected with Rukh's Command in this effort being a traitor, but because if the Militia had known, they would of course have been set up around the sites of both raids. It would have been far easier to take the members of the Command that way than to pursue them into the foothills.

The only possible conclusion was that they had been on standby - and that the driver had been correct. They had been on standby for the single purpose of capturing Hal; and only one man could set such a large effort in motion for that purpose. Bleys Ahrens must now be sure that he was on Harmony. The tall Other Man must have seen to it that the Militia, planet wide, had been made acquainted with Hal's face; and the Militia officer called Barbage must have recognized Hal and reported seeing him after he had escaped following the ambush of the Command in the pass.

Now Rukh and the rest were being seriously hunted. Because of him. What it amounted to, in the end, was that what the driver had shouted after him had been no more than the literal truth.