The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Fifty-four

Opening the door into the warehouse, he found a change in those waiting there; and a change in the very atmosphere of the wide, chill, echoing enclosure. For a second, the faces at the table looked up at him in a savage eagerness, with the glitter of excitement found in the eyes of starving people held back too long from food spread plainly before them. It came to him then that he had forgotten how many years people like these had suffered from the Militia, without a chance to strike back in equal measure. It was small credit to him after all, he told himself, that he should be able to move them now to the point of action for Rukh and against such an enemy.

They dropped their heads, turning their eyes away from him as he stepped through the door and began to approach the table; but the caution was useless. To anyone trained by life as he had been, the fire in those seated there could be felt as plainly as the radiation from a metal stove with a roaring blaze in its belly.

"The question is," said the man in the knitted jacket to Hal, as Hal retook his seat, "whether we've got anything like the number of people you've planned for to do something this big. How many men and women do you think you'll have to have?"

"For which part of the operation?" asked Hal. "To go into the prison section of the Center and bring Rukh out won't take more than a dozen people - and half of those are there only to be dropped off at points along the route, to give us warning if any force is sent against us from the front part of the Center. Any more than six people in on the actual rescue - that's five, including me - would get in each other's way in any small rooms or corridors. Our real protection's going to be in getting in fast and getting out again before the Center's officers realize what's happened."

"Only twelve?" said the tall man who had gotten up to leave, earlier. "But who's to back you up outside, once you've brought Rukh Tamani out?"

"Maybe a dozen more," said Hal, "but those don't need to have combat experience, like those I'll take inside; and in fact, the only really trained help I'll need are going to be the five with me. Give me five former Command members and the others can be anyone you trust to have courage and keep their heads under fire."

- Or give me just two Dorsai like Malachi or Amanda, the back of his mind added. He put the thought from him. Nothing was as useless as wishing for what was not available.

"But you want us meanwhile to staff a full-scale assault on the front of the Center - " began the man in the knitted jacket.

"Thirty people who can actually hit most of what they shoot at," said Hal. "Plus as many more as you've got weapons for and can be trusted not to kill themselves or their friends. But by the time the assault starts, you ought to be able to use those you put to work to stir up the riots and fights, earlier. I'll say it again - the attack on the Center from its front is only for the purpose of occupying the attention of the Militia in the building, for the twenty minutes or so it takes us to get Rukh out. Don't tell me a city area this size can't come up with a hundred hard-core resistance people."

He stopped speaking and looked down the table at all of them. For a moment none of them answered. They were all looking at the tabletop and elsewhere to hide their satisfaction with his answers.

"All right," said Athalia, once more from the far end of the table where she had reseated herself. "We'll have to talk over the details, of course. Why don't you wait in your room until I bring you our answer?"

Hal nodded, getting to his feet. He left the room and all of them to what he was fairly certain was already a foregone conclusion. But instead of going to his room, he stepped out the front door of Athalia's establishment into the darkness and the cool night air of the yard. Three low shapes, heads down and tails wagging solemnly, moved in on him. He squatted on the dirt of the yard and held his arms out to them.

Above them, the cloud cover of the night sky was torn here and there to show the pinpoints of stars. The dogs pressed hard against him, licking at his face and hands…

The next day fighting broke out in the city, here and there, at first between individuals and then between the congregations of various churches. A few fires erupted. The day after there were more fires, fighting was more common and mothers did not send their children to school. By afternoon of the second day, the only people seen on the streets in Ahruma were adults armed with clubs, at the least, and squads of Militia, who ordered them back inside whatever buildings belonged to them, then went on to help the overburdened firemen of the city deal with the conflagrations that seemed to be erupting everywhere. The tempers of the Militiamen had shortened with exhaustion; and the reactiveness of the civilians had risen to match.

"It's out of hand," said Morelly Walden, coming into Athalia's front room late on that afternoon. The slack skin of his aging face was pulled into a shape of sad anger. "We're not controlling it any longer. It's happening on its own."

"As it should," said Hal.

Athalia's front room had been made into a command headquarters; but she and Hal were the only people other than Morelly there at the moment. Morelly looked from Hal to her.

"The city doesn't have a single district left that doesn't have at least two or three fires," he said. "It could end with the whole area burnt down."

"No," said Hal. "The firebugs who've been tempted to go to work on their own are getting tired, just like the Militia and the rest of us. Dawn tomorrow, things will begin to slack off. There's a pattern to riots in cities that's existed since there were cities to riot in."

"I believe you," said Morelly, and sighed, "since I know you from the days in the Command with Rukh. But I can't help worrying, anyway. I think we ought to make our move on Center now."

"No," said Hal. "We need darkness - for psychological as well as tactical reasons. If you want to worry about something, Morelly, worry about whether both the rescue teams and the ones who'll be attacking the front of the Center are getting some rest so as to be ready for tonight. Go check on them. The attackers shouldn't move into position until full dark; and the rescuers mustn't move until the fighting's been going on up front for at least a couple of hours; long enough to draw as many of the Militia in the building as possible up to the front of it."

"All right," said Morelly.

He went across the room and through the door leading back into the warehouse where the cots had been set up for those not presently needed on the streets.

As the door closed behind him, Athalia looked directly across the room at Hal.

"Still," she said, "isn't it about time you were waking those who're going in with you?"

"They already know all I know about what we'll run into," answered Hal, nodding at the plans on the table, plans drawn from the information they had been able to gather from Athalia's contacts with the Center, of the corridors and passageways leading to Rukh's cell. "From here on, it'll be a matter of making decisions, and their following the orders I give. Let them rest as much as they can - if they can."

Shortly after sunset, word came back to Athalia's front room that sniping at the front of the Center building had begun. Hal went into the warehouse to gather his two teams; the one that would penetrate the building and the one that would guard the service courtyard where deliveries were normally made, at the back of the building, where the first team would go in through the barracks kitchen entrance. Of the twenty-five men and women he sought, he found all but one of them awake, sitting up for the most part on the edge of their cots and talking in low voices. The exception was a slim, dark-skinned man dressed in the rough bush clothing that was the informal uniform of those in the Commands - a last minute replacement for one of the interior team whom Hal had not met yet, slumbering face-down.

Hal shook a shoulder and the other sat up. It was Jason Rowe, who had led Hal originally to the Commands and to Rukh Tamani.

"Jase!" said Hal.

"I just made the last truck in," Jason said, yawning hugely. "Greetings, Brother. Forgive me, I've been a little short on sleep lately."

"And I was giving you credit for being the one person here with no nerves." Hal laughed. "How much sleep have you had?"

"Don't worry about me, Howard - Hal, I should say - I've had six - " Jason glanced at the chronometer on his wrist - "no, seven hours since I got here. I heard about you being here and thought you'd need me."

"It's good to see you - and good to have you," said Hal. Jason got to his feet. Hal looked around and raised his voice. "All right, everyone who's with me! Into the front room and we'll get ready to leave."

As the trucks that carried them got close to the Center, they heard the whistle of cone rifles from a couple of blocks away, and when they were closer yet, the tall faces of the buildings on either side of the street brought them echoes of the brief, throaty roars of power weapons, like the angry voicings of large beasts.

The trucks turned into a street along one side of the Center; and the metal gates to the service courtyard entrance, almost to the rear of the block-long buildings stood wide open. Whatever Militia Guards had kept their post here, normally, there was now no sign of them. Instead, four men and one woman in civilian clothes and holding power rifles, with two still figures in uniforms lying against the rear courtyard wall, were waiting for them. Their trucks were waved into the courtyard, and the gates closed behind them.

"Everyone out!" Hal called as the trucks stopped.

He got out himself and saw the riders in the main bodies of the trucks dismount and sort themselves into two groups. He turned to the seven men and five women he would be taking inside with him; and saw that they had already congregated about Jason, as a recognized Command officer.

"Power sidearms and rifles, only, inside," he told them. "Who's got the cable?"

"Here," said one of the men, partially lifting the small spool of what seemed only thin, gray wire, at his belt. The wire was shielded cable for a phone connection between the invaders which the communication equipment in the center would not register, let alone be able to tap.

"Stretcher?"

"Here," answered a woman. She held up what seemed to be only a pair of poles wrapped in canvas.

'Good," said Hal. He looked for the four people who had been guarding the black metal gates when the trucks arrived, and saw one of them, a man, standing a little apart from the two groups. "Anyone in the kitchen there, as far as you know?"

"We were inside," said the man, shifting his power rifle from one arm to the other. "There was just one person on duty. She's tied up in a corner of the main room."

That would mean, thought Hal, that the kitchen attendant on duty was a civilian. If she had been of the Militia, they would have killed her.

"All right," Hal turned back to his dozen people. "After me, then. If you fall out of touch with me, or something happens to me, take your orders from Jason Rowe, here. Keep together; and you observers take posts in the order we talked about earlier today. Report anything - anything at all out of the ordinary you see or hear - over the phone circuit. Come on."

They went in, with Hal in the lead. Inside, the kitchen was only partially lighted over the sinks at one end and smelled heavily of cooked vegetables and soap. Hal saw a bundle of dark blue cloth under the furthest sink that must be the bound and gagged attendant.

"First observer, here," he said. One of the two women in his group, taller and leaner than the other and in her forties, stooped and took the end of the cable from the drum slung from the shoulders of the man beside her, clipping it to a wrist phone on her right arm. The detailed map of the Center's interior, which Athalia had provided for Hal to study, was printed in his mind. He led the rest off through a doorway in the wall to his left, down a long, straight corridor where the odors, by contrast, were dominated by the sharp smell of some vinegarish disinfectant.

Dropping off observers at the points already picked out on the map he had studied, Hal led deep into the interior of the block-square building and quietly down three flights of ramps. At the base of the last of the ramps, a man in black Militia uniform snored lightly on a cot beside a bare desk and just to the left of a barred door leading to a corridor lined with metal doors that could be seen beyond. The Militiaman slept the utter sleep of exhaustion, and only woke as they began to bind his arms and legs to make him a prisoner.

"How do I open the door to the cells?" Hal asked him.

"I won't tell you," said the Militiaman, hoarsely.

Hal shrugged. There was no time to waste in persuading the man, even if he had preferred doing so. With his power pistol he slagged the lock of the barred door, which had not been designed to resist that sort of assault. Kicking the still-hot bars of the door to open it, Hal led the six who were left, including the team member with the reel of cable, into the corridor lined with cell doors. The last of the observers was left behind with the trussed and gagged Militiaman.

The doors of the cells, like the door on the cell Hal had shared with Jason, long before, in Citadel's Militia Center, were solid metal with only a small observation window which could be covered with a sliding panel. The observation windows on the cells they passed were uncovered; and as Hal glanced into each, he saw it was empty. They reached the end of the corridor where it ran into another corridor at right angles, running right and left.

"Shall we split up, Hal?" Jason asked.

"No," said Hal. "Let's try to the right, first."

The leg of the cross corridor to the right offered more empty cells - but also three inhabited ones. They slagged the locks on these and released two men and one woman who turned out to have been arrested the day before in the course of the rioting. All three had been badly treated; but only one of the men required assistance to walk; and this the other two gave him. Hal sent them back to the room where the last observer waited with the bound Militiaman, with orders to follow the cable wire from there to the kitchen and freedom.

In the same way Hal and his team proceeded through eight more corridors and cross corridors, releasing over twenty inmates, only one of which had been there before the riot; and who had to be carried out by his fellow-rescued on a makeshift stretcher. Still, they had not found Rukh; and a coldness was settling into existence, deep inside Hal, at the thought that maybe they were half a day too late - perhaps she had died and her body had been taken out to be disposed of by whatever method was used in Centers like this one.

"That's the end of it," said Jason Rowe at Hal's left shoulder.

They had come to the end of a corridor and the wall that faced them was doorless and blank.

"It can't be," said Hal. He turned about and went back to the room before the entrance into the cell block.

"There are other cells," he said to the captured Militiaman. "Where?"

The white face of the bound man in the black uniform stared up into his and did not answer. Hal felt something like a breath of coldness that blew briefly through his chest. A living pressure went out from him and he saw the man on the cot felt it. He stared down.

"You'll tell me," he said; and heard - as a stranger might hear - a difference in his voice.

The other's eyes were already wide, his face was already pale; but the skin seemed to shrink back on his bones as Hal's stare held him. Something more than fear moved between the two of them. In Hal's mind there came back a long-ago echo of a voice that had been his, telling a man like this to suffer; and now, in front of him, the Militiaman stared back as a bird might stare at a weasel.

"The second door, in the first corridor to the right - it isn't a cell door," the man answered, huskily. "It's a stair door, to the cells downstairs."

Hal went back to the cell block. He heard the footfalls of Jason and the others on the concrete floor behind him, hurrying to keep up. He came to the door the Militiaman had mentioned and saw that the window shield of it was open. The view through it showed an ordinary, empty cell. He tried the door handle.

It was unlocked.

He swung it wide; and it yawned open to his left. Stepping through, he turned and saw a picture screen box fastened over the window on the inside face of the door. Beyond were wide, gray, concrete stairs under bright illumination, leading downward. He descended them swiftly, through the door at the bottom, and stepped into a corridor less than fifteen meters in length, with cell doors lacking windows spaced along each side of it.

Where the windows might have been were red metal flags, and these, on all the doors but one, were down. Hal took five long strides to the one with the flag up and reached for its latch.

It was locked. He slagged the lock. Holstering his pistol, he tore off a section of his shirt, wadded it up to protect his hand, and, grasping the handle above the ruined lock, swung the door open.

A sewer stench struck him solidly in the face. He stepped inside, almost slipping for a second on the human waste that covered the floor. Inside, after the brilliance of the light in the corridor outside, he could see nothing. He stood still and let his senses reach out.

A scant current of moving air from some slow ventilating system touched his left cheek. His ears caught the even fainter sound of shallow breathing ahead of him. He stepped forward cautiously, with his arms outstretched and felt a hard, blank wall. Feeling down, at the foot of the wall, his hands discovered the shape of a body. He scooped it up; and it came lightly into his arms as if it weighed no more than a half-grown child. He turned and carried it put the doorway into the light.

For less than a second the thin, foul-smelling bundle of rags he held in his arms could have been someone other than Rukh. She was almost skeletal; bruises and half-healed lacerations and burns had distorted her features and her hair was matted with filth. But her dark eyelids, which had closed against the light as he stepped through the doorway, opened slowly, and the brown eyes that looked up at him were untouched and unchanged

With effort, her dry lips parted. Barely, he heard the whisper that came from her.

"I testify yet to thee, my God."

A memory of a day in which he had stood to his neck in water, looking through the screening branches of a waterside bush, returned to Hal. Through the delicate tracery of brown twigs and small green leaves, he remembered seeing in the distance - now, for the first time, clearly - three old men on a terrace, surrounded by young men in black with long barrelled pistols and a very tall, slim man; and his arms pressed the body he held close to himself, tenderly and protectively, as if it was something more precious than the universe could know. Deep within him, the breath of coldness that had woken in him momentarily in Athalia's outer office came back, coalesced to a point, and kindled into icy fire.

"Here," he said, putting Rukh gently into Jason's arms. "Take her out of here; and give me your rifle."

His hand closed about the small of the butt of Jason's power rifle, as the other man handed it to him. The feel of the polished wood against his fingers was strange - as if he had never touched such a thing before - and at the same time, unforgettably familiar and inescapable. He holstered his own power pistol and turned to one of the others who carried a rifle.

"And yours…" he said

He grasped the second rifle in his other hand and looked again at Jason.

"If I'm not outside with the rest of you when you've loaded the trucks," he said, "don't wait for me."

He turned and went off before Jason had time to question him. He heard the footsteps of the others begin and follow. But the sound of their feet died away quickly behind him, for he was moving with long strides, up the stairs, out of the cell block and through the entrance room. He passed the final observer there without answering her as she tried to question him about the still-bound Militiaman, and went on up the corridor beyond.

The chart he had studied of the Center's interior layout was burned sharply into his memory. As he approached the next to last observer she stared at him and at the two rifles he carried nakedly, one in each hand.

"Monitoring equipment from the yard just called to say they think a party's been sent from the front of Center to deal with us - " she began.

"Jason and the rest have Rukh," he interrupted, without breaking stride. "Go with them as soon as they reach you."

He continued straight down the corridor, parting company with the cable, which here made a ninety degree turn into a cross corridor, on its way back to the kitchen and its exit.

"But where are you going, Hal Mayne?" the observer called after him.

He did not answer; and the echoes of her question followed him down the corridor.

He went on, following the chart in his head now, turning at the second cross corridor he came to, heading toward the front of the building. Inside him, the point of coldness was expanding, spreading out through all his body. All his senses were tuned to an acuteness wound to the edge of pain. He saw and remembered each crack and jointure in the walls that he passed. He heard the normally silent breathing of air in the ventilating system through the gratings in the ceiling beneath which he stepped. His mind was focused on a single point that ranged ahead of him, reaching through the walls and corridors between the Center's front offices, where the majority of the black-clad Militia would be, their officers with them and Amyth Barbage, among those officers.

Now, the coldness possessed him totally. He felt nothing - only the purpose in him. He turned into a new corridor and saw, ten meters down it, three Militiamen pushing a small, wheeled, power cannon in his direction.

He walked toward them, even as they suddenly noticed him and stopped in stunned silence to stare at him, striding toward them. Then, as one of them roused at last and reached for the power cannon's firing lever, the rifles in his hands roared briefly, the one in his left hand twice - like the coughings of a lion - and the three men dropped. He walked up to them, past them, and on toward the front of the building.

"Report!" rapped a harsh voice from a speaker grille in the ceiling of the corridor. "Sergeant Abram - report!"

He walked on.

"What's happening there, Sergeant? Report!" cried the speaker grille, more faintly over the increasing distance between it and him. He walked on.

He was all of one piece, now; with the coldness in him that left no room for anything else. Turning into another corridor he faced two more Militiamen and cut them down also with his rifles; but not before one of the counter discharges from the power pistols both carried cut a smoking gash in the jacket sleeve of his upper left arm. He smelled the odor of the burned cloth and the burned flesh beneath, but felt no heat or pain.

He was getting close to the front of the building; and the corridor he was on ended a short distance ahead in another cross corridor. Already, there was a difference in what he saw around him. The doors, that were now of glass, to the dark offices he passed had become more widely separated, indicating that the rooms they opened on were larger than those he had passed earlier. Half a dozen steps from its end, the corridor he was in abruptly widened, its walls now faced with smooth stone where up to this point they had been merely of white-painted concrete. The floor had also changed, becoming covered with a pattern of inlaid gray tiles in various shapes, highly polished; and his footsteps rang more sharply upon this new surface. To the abnormal acuteness of his vision, under the now-hidden but even brighter illumination from overhead, the invisible atmosphere about him seemed to quiver like the flesh of a living creature.

He had been moving under the impetus of something neither instinct nor training, which directed him from the back, hidden recesses of his mind. Now he felt this impetus, like a hand laid on one of his shoulders, stop him, turn him and steer him into one of the dark offices. He closed the door behind him and stood to one side in the interior shadows, looking out through the transparency of the door at the empty corridor ahead.

For a few seconds he heard and saw nothing. Then, from a distance there came a growing sound that was the hasty beating of many feet, rapidly approaching; and, within a minute, fully a dozen fully-armed Militiamen burst into sight around a corner of the cross corridor and ran past him back the way he had come. He let them go. When they were out of sight, he stepped back into the passageway, and continued, turning left into the cross corridor in the direction from which they had just come.

A short dogleg in this direction, and then another turn, brought him to a final cross corridor busy with men in black uniforms hurrying back and forth between doorways. These glanced at him puzzledly as he walked among them; but no one stopped him until he came at last to an open doorway on his left, looked in, and saw a large room with a long, fully-occupied conference table and blackout curtains over tall windows in a far wall. Two Militiamen privates with cone rifles stood guard, one on each side of the entrance; and when he turned to enter, they stepped to bar his way, the rifles snapping up to cover him.

"Who're you - " began one of them.

Hal struck out right and left at both men. The butt of a power rifle crashed into the forehead of one, the barrel end across the throat of the other, and they dropped. Hal stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

Those at the conference table within were already on their feet. Still moving swiftly, he saw clearly what his first glance through the doorway had made him suspect, that the uniforms of all of them there showed officer's rank.

Two reached for holstered pistols at their belts; and the rifles in his hands coughed. They fell; and the other officers stood staring. A hand turned the doorknob from the corridor, outside.

"Stay out!" shouted the officer at the far end of the table.

"Where's Amyth Barbage?" Hal asked - for the man he had come to find was nowhere in the room. He continued to move as he spoke around the walls of the room, so that he could cover with his weapons not only those at the table but the closed door through which he had just come.

No one answered. Still moving, and approaching the table, Hal swung the muzzle of the rifle in his left fist to center on the senior officer present, a squarely-built major in his fifties, at the end of the table farthest from the door, under the curtains of one of the windows.

"He's not here - " said the Major.

"Where?" demanded Hal.

The Major's face had been pale. Now the color came back.

"No one here knows," he said, harshly. "If anyone could tell you, even, it'd be me - and I can't."

"But he's in the Center," said Hal; for Athalia's people had reported Barbage returning to the Center some hours past, and that he had not gone out again.

"Satan take you!" said the Major. "Do you think I'd tell you if I knew?"

But to Hal's hypersensitive hearing in this moment, there was a note of triumph in the officer's voice that convinced him not only that the other was lying and knew where Barbage was, but that something had been achieved by the other since Hal had entered the room.

The words of the second to last observer on the cable line came back to Hal, telling him that the monitoring equipment in the kitchen courtyard had called with the suspicion that an earlier party had been sent from the front of the building to deal with the team sent out to rescue Rukh. The Major's hands were in open sight on the tabletop, but he was standing with the middle of his body pressed against the table-edge before him. Hal moved swiftly forward and knocked the man backward. Cut at an angle of forty-five degrees into the table's edge and covered until now by the bottom edge of the Major's uniform jacket was a communications panel as long as Hal's hand, but hardly wider than a ruler.

The door to the room smashed open and armed Militiamen erupted inward.

"Take him now!" The Major's order came out more scream than shout. Around the table, the officers who had not yet drawn their sidearms were reaching for them.

Malachi Nasuno, or anyone who had ever had Dorsai training, could have pointed out their error. Their very numbers were the cause out of which their failure could be certainly predicted. Moving thinkingly and surely around the table, using the bodies of those who would kill or capture him as shields, Hal disabled or threw into the fire of the weapons aimed at him all those with whom he came in contact. Finally, as the room began to be empty of people still on their feet, panic took those of the Militia who were still unharmed; and there was a sudden, general rush for the still-open door.

Hal found himself standing alone, the passage beyond the open doorway empty.

But, caught still in the coldness that held him, he was aware that the victory was a transient one; and that the way out the still-open door was no safe escape route for him. Turning, he pointed his power pistol at one curtained window and blew out both curtain and window. The thick but ragged edge of the window material showed through the tatters of the curtain. It had been heavy sandwich glass, which would have frustrated even the energy of a power pistol at any greater distance than the point blank range at which he had used the one he held.

He knew from the plan in his memory that the window from which he was escaping was near one end of the building's front, closest to that same side which, further back, held the courtyard and the kitchen entrance. He dropped onto concrete sidewalk, behind the line of Militia cars parked along the front curb of the street. Having landed, he stayed flat on his belly at the foot of the front wall of the Center; and had this sensible decision rewarded by hearing the whistle and pock of impacts on the wall above him, of cones fired by the resistance people in buildings across the street.

Undoubtedly, among those rounded up to maintain a steady fire on the Center's front, there were responsible individuals who would realize that someone not in Militia uniform, exiting out a smashed window of the building, was hardly likely to be an enemy. But they would be too few and too scattered to get that understanding passed quickly to all the excited amateurs with weapons surrounding them.

The cone rifle firing continued - but, as he had foreseen, the line of vehicles parked parallel to the curb shielded him from the direct view of the resistance people, and from any shots that came close. While his position up against the base of the wall, under the narrow outcropping of the decorative stone window ledge over which he had just come, protected him from observation and fire from above the building. Almost immediately, he began to wriggle along the base of the wall toward the corner of the building, only a few scant meters from him.

He reached it and turned the corner. Rising to his feet he ran down the empty, lamplit street toward the lights of the kitchen courtyard.

There was a silence about the courtyard as he got closer that made him slow his steps and begin to move more quietly, himself. There had not been time for the rest of the team to get loaded into the trucks and away, yet. He went swiftly but softly until he came to the beginning of the courtyard wall. Ignoring the gate, he found finger-cracks enough where the building wall joined that of the courtyard, climbed to the top of the wall and dropped down inside.

The trucks were still there, close enough to him so that they blocked his view of most of the rest of the courtyard. He drew the power pistol and went with it in his hand around the back of the nearest truck… and breathed out with relief.

The team was just now loading, ready to depart. But something - it may have been their first sight of Rukh as she now was - seemed to have impressed them to a degree he himself had not been able to, earlier. They were moving as silently as they could, and communicating by hand signals wherever possible.

Rukh was just now being brought to the back of the nearer truck. He holstered his gun and stepped forward into the midst of them. Ignoring the astonishment of the others, to whom he must have seemed to have appeared out of empty air, he walked to the side of the stretcher on which they carried her.

Her bearers checked themselves, just short of handing the stretcher up to those waiting to receive it, behind the raised tailgate of the truck; and Rukh herself looked up at him. The nurse they had had among those waiting with the backup team in the courtyard had possibly already given her medications to ease and strengthen her; but the eyes looking up into his were now more widely open and her voice, though still whispering, was stronger than he had heard it in the cell block.

"Thank you, Hal," she said.

For a moment the coldness moved back from him.

"Thank the others," he said. "I had selfish motives; but the others just wanted you out."

She blinked at him. Her eyes were moist. He thought she would like to say something more; but that the effort was too great. Hastily he spoke himself.

"Lie quiet," he said. "I'm taking you clear off-planet to Mara; where the Exotics can put you back together, body and mind, as good as new."

"Body only…" she whispered. "My mind is always my own…"

Hal felt his right sleeve plucked. He turned and saw Athalia standing just behind him with a face shaped by cold anger. He allowed her to pull him back out of earshot of Rukh.

"You didn't tell us anything about taking her off-world!" Athalia whispered savagely in his ear.

"Would you have risked lives to rescue her, if I had?" he answered grimly, but with equal softness. "I told you she had a value to the whole race, above and beyond her value to all of you here on Harmony. Now that she's free, do you suppose anything less than off-planet can be safe for her, or safe for anyone who might try to hide her?"

Athalia's hand fell from his sleeve.

"You're an enemy, after all," she said, bitterly.

"Ask yourself that a year from now," said Hal. "In any case, the Exotic Embassy can help get her off Harmony, which none of you can do; and once she's known to be on another world, the pressure from the Militia, turning you all upside down to find her, will let up."

"Yes," Athalia said. But she still looked at him savagely as he turned away from her.

They had begun to lift the stretcher's far end so as to pass it to those in the truck. There was a pause as they made the decision to lower the tailgate first, after all. In the moment of that pause, a voice struck at them from the kitchen entrance of the building.

"So!" it said, hard, loud and triumphant in the silence of the lamplit courtyard, "the Whore of Abomination has friends who would try to steal her from God's justice?"

Everyone looked. Amyth Barbage, stick-thin in his close-fitting black Militia colonel's uniform, stood alone in the entrance to the kitchen. He carried a power rifle, generally pointed at all of them; and Hal's eyes, without moving, saw that - like himself - none of the rest had weapons in hand and ready for use.

Alone and apparently indifferent to that fact, Barbage walked three steps forward from the doorway. His power rifle pointed more directly toward the stretcher bearing Rukh, and those who stood closely around it.

"Carry her back inside," he said, harshly. "Now!"

The coldness returned to Hal with a rush; and from the same place that it came from in him, came other knowledge he had not known he had.

A wordless shout that erupted like an explosion in the stillness of the courtyard tore itself from him. It came from every nerve and muscle of his being, not merely from the lungs alone, the utmost in sound of which his body was capable; and it went out like a bludgeon against the thin, white-faced man, a wall of sound directed against Barbage alone. For a moment the other seemed stunned and frozen by it; and in that same moment, Hal leaped aside from the line of aim of the Militia officer's rifle, drew his own pistol and fired.

The knowledge, the actions, were all as they should have been. But Hal's body had not been trained relentlessly from birth and never allowed to fall out of the ultimate in fine-tuned conditioning. The early years with Malachi and the last couple of years of self-exercise at the Encyclopedia could not give him what the years of his lifetime would have given a body born and raised on the Dorsai. The energy bolt from his power gun struck, not Barbage at whom it was aimed, but Barbage's rifle, spinning it from that officer's hands to skitter across the rough paving of the courtyard with the last few millimeters of its barrel's muzzle-end glowing a dull red heat.

And Barbage - where Hal had been less than he should, Barbage was more. Barbage, who should have been doubly immobilized, first by the killing shout, and then by the loss of his weapon, recovered before Hal had fully regained his balance. Bare-handed, he plunged toward the truck and Rukh on her stretcher.

Hal threw up the muzzle of his pistol to fire, found too many bodies in the way, and dropped his sidearm on the pavement. He leaped forward himself to meet Barbage, just as the other reached the tailgate of the truck. Hal's hands intercepted and closed on the furious, narrow body, at waist and shoulder, and lifted it into the air. It was like lifting a man of cloth and straw.

"No!" Rukh said.

The volume of her voice was hardly more than the whisper in which she had spoken a moment earlier; but Hal heard it and it stopped him. The coldness held him in an icy fist.

"Why?" he said. Barbage was still in the air, motionless now above the paving on which his life could be dashed out.

"You cannot touch him," said Rukh. "Put him down."

A quiver like that which comes from overtensed muscles passed through Hal; but he still held Barbage in the air.

"For my sake, Hal," he heard her say through the coldness, "put him back on his feet."

Slowly, the coldness yielded. He lowered the man he held and set him upright. Barbage stood, his face frozen, staring not at him, but at Rukh.

"He must be stopped," Hal muttered. "A long time ago, James Child-of-God told me he had to be stopped."

"James was much loved by God, and by many of the rest of us," said Rukh. With great effort she raised herself slightly from the stretcher and looked Hal in the face. "But not even the saints are always right. I tell you you cannot touch this man. He is of the Elect and he hears no one but himself and the Lord. You think you can punish him for what he did to me and others, by destroying his body. But his body means nothing to him."

Hal turned to stare at the white face above the black uniform collar, that did not see him - only Rukh.

"Then what?" Hal heard himself saying: "Something has to be done."

"Then do it," said Rukh. "Something far harsher than destroying his mortal envelope. He will not hear his fellows. Leave him then to the Lord. Leave him, by himself, to the voice of God."

Hal was still staring at Barbage, waiting for the other man to speak. But to his wonderment, Barbage said nothing. Nor did he move. He simply stood, gazing at Rukh, as she sagged back on to the stretcher.

For a moment there was no movement anywhere in the courtyard. Then, slowly, the resistance people began to continue bringing Rukh fully aboard the vehicle and themselves mounting into it and the other one that waited for them. Hal stood, continuing to watch Barbage, waiting for him to make a leap for the fallen power rifle. But Barbage still stood motionless, his expression unchanged, staring into the darkness under the canvas hood of the truck into which Rukh had now disappeared.

The motor of that truck started. Then the motor of the other vehicle.

"Hal! Come on!" called the voice of Jason.

Slowly, still keeping an eye on Barbage, Hal stepped back two paces and picked up his power pistol from where it had landed when he had flung it down. Careful not to turn his back on the Militia officer, he swung himself up into the back of the truck which held Rukh. Once up, he turned, and stood above the again-raised tailgate, holding the pistol ready at his side as the truck he was in slowly pulled out of the courtyard and until the wall about it finally cut off his view of its interior.

But Barbage had not moved from where he stood.