He found one of the territory roughly three days march ahead, took it out and replaced it with the original slide, and put the other slides back in the mapcase. Outside the voice of Barbage ceased speaking. Hal stepped to the tent flap and peered out, his fingers lightly grasping the knife hilt.
But Barbage was still standing, silently staring at the two by the fire. A moment later he began to speak to them again; and in a second Hal was into the woods. Another minute put him safely beyond earshot of the voice; and five minutes later he was well on his way back to the Command.
When he returned, daylight was still a full hour off; and Child, when Hal looked into the Lieutenant's tent, was sleeping heavily. Hal went back to his own tent and found his own map viewer. Sitting cross-legged in the darkness while Jason slept undisturbed behind him, he put the stolen slide into it.
The small interior illuminant of the viewer, triggered to life by his finger pressure on its control, made the map leap into white, illuminated relief before him. It showed a stretch of rises and hollows of land, covered with scrub vegetation identical with the area they were now in. To the bottom of its display, a road ran almost horizontally across the map, to intersect with a crossroad near the lower right corner. Marked along the road were three asterisks, with code marks next to them.
The code marks were undecipherable, but a good guess could be made at what they represented. They would give details of the number of trucks and personnel who would be delivering supplies to the points the asterisks marked. It was the delivery of such supplies that allowed the Militia to travel light; and made up for the fact that the Militiamen themselves were, from lack of experience, slow and clumsy compared to the members of the Command. Also, the frequent contact with vehicles at the delivery points allowed for speedy evacuation of sick or hurt men; or any who might, for one reason or another, slow down the pursuit.
Hal mentally photographed the map, took it from the viewer and put it in his pocket. He went to find Falt and pay back the extra hour of watch the other had taken for him.
"You go get some sleep while you can!" Falt said. "James and Rukh are bad enough without you trying to imitate them and sleep less than half an hour out of the day and night together. I'm fine."
"All right," said Hal. He was suddenly unutterably conscious of his own weariness, and of a sort of light-headedness at the same time. "Thanks."
"Just get some sleep," said Falt.
"If you'll wake me as soon as Rukh gets up."
"Oh? All right, then."
Hal went back to his own tent. Crawling into his bedsack, with nothing but his boots and harness removed and his pockets emptied, he lay back in the dark, staring at the darkness under the tent roof, with one forearm flung up across his eyes. He realized suddenly that his forehead felt hot; and anger erupted in him. A number of the Command besides Child were beginning to show signs of minor infections as the unrelieved exhaustion exacted its price; but he had assumed that he, of all of them, should be immune to any such thing. He pushed the emotion aside as unprofitable. It was true he had been on his feet, with only brief naps, for several days now…
He woke suddenly to the awareness that he had been asleep, and that Falt, standing back, was shaking his left foot within the bedsack, to wake him. He blinked into full awareness.
"Have I been jumping on people who wake me?" he asked.
"Not jumping—but you do come awake as if you meant to hit first and open your eyes after," said Falt. "You'll find Rukh by the kitchen setup."
"Right," said Hal, pulling himself out of his bedsack and reaching for the contents of his pocket where he had laid them out earlier. He checked suddenly and looked back up at Falt. "At the kitchen? How long has she been up? A couple of hours? I asked you—"
Falt snorted, turned and went out.
Hal finished redressing and went out himself. Rukh, as Falt had said, was down where the kitchen had been set up on making camp the night before, standing, plate and fork in hand, to finish her early meal. She looked up at Hal as he approached.
"I made a short visit to the Militia camp early this morning—" he began.
"I know," she said, scraping her plate clean and handing it, with the fork, back to Tallah. "James told me he gave you permission. In the future, I'd like you to be a little more specific about why you want to make such a reconnaissance. I've told James to ask you for it."
"I wasn't too sure what I could find out," he said. "As it happened, I was lucky…"
He told her about Barbage and the two young Militiamen on watch.
"So I took advantage of the chance to go right into his tent," he said. "It's what I suspected. Barbage's not like the others. He's serious military. His tent shows it. Anyway, I got one of the maps from his case."
He handed her his viewer with the map already in it.
She put it to her eye and pressed the button for the illuminant. For a long moment she stood studying it without saying a word. Then she lowered the viewer, took out the map slide and handed the viewer back to him, putting the map in her pocket.
"It looks like the country up ahead of us," she said.
He nodded.
"It was in order with the other maps in his map case—I estimated three days march ahead."
"What good did you think it would do us to have this?"
"For one thing," he said, "it lets us check our own maps against it. No offense to the local people you got ours from, but what we have's a lot more sketchy and less accurate than this which has to be from breakdowns of regular survey information."
"All right," she said. "But we might have lost you; and you've become valuable to us, Howard. I'm not sure it was worth the risk."
"I thought," he said slowly, "we might consider hijacking some of those supplies they're sending him."
Her dark eyes were hard on him.
"It could cost us six to ten people, attacking one of those supply points. Do you think they send out trucks like that without adequate troops and weapons to protect it?"
"I didn't mean at the supply point," he said. "I thought we could take just a single truck, someplace along the route, since we know ahead of time where they'll be headed for."
She was silent.
"We can easily figure out the route a truck'll have to take to the supply point. The old hands in the Command tell me they don't generally send them out in group convoy, but one at a time."
"That's true," she said, thoughtfully. "Normally, they don't worry about a pursued Command having the time to get down to the roads. Also, it's easier to send out each filled truck as it's ready, than to struggle with a convoy of half a dozen to be unloaded all at once and brought back together."
"If you want…" He closed in on her first expression of interest quickly, "I can figure out the details of taking one of them, and you or Child could decide from there. Almost anything they'd be carrying would be something we'd need."
She looked at him soberly.
"How much rest have you had lately?" she asked.
"As much as anyone else."
"Which anyone else? James?"
"Or you," he said, bluntly.
"I'm Captain of this Command, and James is First Officer. Tonight," she said, "you're to be off any duty you're scheduled for. Tonight, you sleep. The next day, if you've slept through, bring me a plan for taking one of the trucks."
"We'll be only one day away from that map by tomorrow," he said.
"There're three supply points marked on it, each one at least a day apart. You're not going to lack time to plan."
There was no reasonable argument against that. He nodded; and was turning away to get something to eat himself, when his mind exploded suddenly with the understanding that had been gnawing its way out of his unconscious into his conscious from the moment in which he had first glimpsed the slide in Barbage's tent.
"Rukh!" He swung back to her. Her eyes stared questioningly at his face. "I knew there was something wrong! We've got to change route, right away!"
"What is it?" She had tensed, reflecting his tension.
"That slide. I knew something was bothering me about it. You said it yourself just now! It shows supply points for the next three to six days. Why would Barbage have arranged deliveries of supplies up to six days ahead along the road we just happen to be paralleling now? He knows we never move in the same line for more than two days at a time. Six days from now we'd be anywhere but close to that road, and his troops are right behind us!"
He saw understanding register on her. She swung about.
"Tallan!" she snapped. "Go find James. Pass the word to get moving under any conditions at all. The Militia've sent units into the woods ahead of us to catch us between them and the troops that're after us."
Chapter Twenty-eight
A scant thirty-one of the Command that had counted over a hundred members when it left the Mohler-Beni farm drove a struggling line of donkeys, of which only two were unloaded, through the dripping woods. The late spring of Harmony North Continent had turned unseasonably cold here at an altitude four thousand feet higher than the rich farmland through which they had passed only a week and a half before; and three days now of intermittent, icy rain had soaked everything human or animal not protected by impermeable coverings, chilling them all to the bone.
They had stripped themselves of anything not immediately necessary. They were down to only a dozen tents, in which they slept three or four together, rather than two, and a few donkey-loads of the kind of food that could be eaten without cooking, out of the hand, on the march. They were nearly all staggering with exhaustion and most were hot with fever. Some respiratory illness had run wild among them since Masenvale; coughing sounded continually up and down their column as, fiery-eyed and dry-skinned wherever the frequent downpours had not found a crevice in their ancient raingear, they plodded through the underbrush of the high foothills.
None of them looked as skeletally close to death as Child-of-God. Yet he continued to move, holding his place in the column and performing his duties as First Officer. The penetrating harshness of his voice had sunk to a near-whisper; but what he said was what he had always said, without difference or admission of weakness.
Of them all, Hal and Rukh appeared to be in the best shape. But they were both among the younger members of the diminished Command to begin with; and each, in his or her own way, seemed to possess a unique personal strength. Hal burned with fever and coughed with the others, but there was a reserve of energy in him that even he was surprised to find—as if he had uncovered a mechanism by which he could continue to burn himself internally for fuel until the last scrap of his bone and flesh had been consumed.
In the case of Rukh, an inner flame that had nothing to do with a self-consummation of her physical body appeared to promise to keep her going until the richly-yellow orb of Epsilon Eridani, now hidden by the weeping cloud cover overhead, should become cindered and cold. Like all the rest of them, she had lost weight, until she might have been the look-alike grandchild of Obadiah or Child-of-God; but this seemed in no way to have lessened her. That inner flame of hers glowing through her dark skin seemed to shine before them like a lamp in the night; and she was more beautiful than ever in her present leanness and fatigue.
They had escaped being caught by the jaws of the trap Barbage had planned to close upon them—jaws that consisted of his own Militia and those he had sent ahead into the woods three days march before them, to come back and assist his own unit in encircling them beyond any possibility of escape. But the Command had slipped out to freedom by bare meters of distance rather than kilometers. Since then, Barbage had pursued them with a unyielding steadiness, resupplying and remanning his Militia ranks constantly, so that fresh troops were at all times on their heels.
They were given no chance to rest or reorder themselves; and by ones, twos and threes, individual members had faltered in their weariness, or sickened, and been sent away from the main body to try and make their solitary escape as best they might. With them had gone nearly all the spare equipment and donkeys—everything that could be done without, except the bare means of continuing to flee and the sacks of gunpowder and fertilizer that Rukh refused to give up.
She would not admit that escape from this unending hunt was impossible. It seemed that while the lamp burned eternally in her she could not; and her utter refusal to consider any other end to their situation than the accomplishment of their mission hauled the remaining members of the Command forward as if her will was a rope tying them all physically together. Even Hal, who from his Exotic training had the ability to stand aside from her effect upon them, ended by letting himself be deeply seized and moved by it, almost to the point of forgetting his own life and purpose—the purpose he knew must be there, but which he had yet to see clearly—to join in that which Rukh clearly put before all other goals.
Thinking of this, even through the fog of his fever and aching muscles, there came to him finally on wings of insight largely slowed by fatigue the commonplace realization that the great charismatic power of Others like Bleys Ahrens derived not from any special combination of Dorsai and Exotic influences, but solely from the culture of the Friendlies, in its utter absorption with the power to convince and convert. It came as a shock to him, for in spite of knowing Obadiah, he had not been unaffected with the common idea that of the three great Splinter Cultures, the Friendlies had the least in practical powers to offer from the special talents developed by their culture. And—like the final part of a firing mechanism clicking into place to make the whole weapon operative and deadly, it woke in him that in this obvious reason lay the mechanism that had made possible the Others' sudden explosive rise to power behind the scenes on all the worlds except the Dorsai, the Exotics and Earth.
The point that had always puzzled everyone about the achievement of that power had been the repeatedly acknowledged fact that the Others were so very few. Granted, they had chosen to model their organization on the large criminal networks of centuries past, so that they influenced those with power to gain their ends, rather than holding power themselves. Still—in terms of the few thousand that they were, compared to the billions of ordinary humans on the inhabited worlds, even that concept did not explain how they maintained their control. Those they controlled personally were in such large relative numbers that it would be an overwhelming job for the Others just to keep track of replacements being made in their positions, let alone make a fresh effort to convert to an Others-follower each new official. But, thought Hal now, if they could send forth non-Others as disciples, whose own sparks of talent for making such conversions had been fanned by Other efforts into roaring flames, such control became not merely possible, but reasonable.
If that was the explanation for Other success, then it also explained their concern with controlling Harmony and Association; as well as the reason for those two worlds' sudden explosion of activity into interworld commerce within the last twenty or so standard years—an activity which in earlier centuries the Friendlies had scorned except when necessity drove them to a need for the things that only interstellar credits could buy.
Something within the formless movement of Hal's unconscious seemed to register the importance of the conclusion he had just achieved. But there was no leisure to ponder the matter any further, now. If he lived and had the chance, he could check out his discovery. If not, nothing would be changed. Only, he could not bring himself to believe that he would not survive. Either the idea was simply not possible to him, or else his absorption of the uniquely Dorsai attitude of Malachi had dyed the inability to give up into his very bones and soul beyond any laundering. Like Rukh, with her goal of destroying the Core Tap power station, he could not turn aside from the goal he had chosen; and, since death would be a form of turning-aside, death was also not to be considered.
Up ahead of him, the next man in line came to an unexpected, staggering halt; and, having halted, sank down as if his body had suddenly lost all strength in its muscles. Hal move
d up and past him.
"What is it?" Hal asked.
The man merely shook his head, his eyes already closed and his breathing beginning to deepen into the slow, heavy rhythm of sleep. Hal went on up, past donkeys and past other members of the team, men and women slumped down where they had ceased moving, some of them already snoring.
At the head of the column, he found Rukh, still on her feet, helping Tallah off with her pack.
"Why the stop?" said Hal, and cleared his throat against the hoarseness in his voice.
"They needed a halt—a short one, anyway." Rukh got the pack all the way off and bent to examine a hole rubbed in the back of Tallah's heavy checked green workshirt. "We can pad it," she said, "and change the dressing again. But it's turning into a regular ulcer. You shouldn't be carrying a pack at all, with that."
"Fine," said Tallah. "I'll leave it off, then, and the pack can trot along behind me on its own little legs."
"All right," said Rukh, "go see Falt and get a new dressing put on the sore; then you and he figure out what you want to do about putting a better pad on your pack harness. We'll be up and moving again in ten minutes."
Tallah reached for the straps of her pack with her left hand, lifted it clear of the ground, and carrying it that way at ankle-height, headed back down the column toward Falt.
Rukh's eyes went to meet Hal. They stood, made private for a moment by the distance between them and the next closest members of the Command.
"We had a break only thirty-five minutes ago," said Hal.
"Yes," she said, more quietly, "but in any case we had to stop now, and I didn't want to upset the Command any more than they are already. Come along."
She led him off into the woods. As soon as the vegetation screened them from sight, she turned left to parallel the column and led the way down alongside it for half a dozen meters. Following her, in spite of the preparation for this moment he had had in events of the past few weeks, it struck Hal like a physical blow to see James Child-of-God, seated on the ground on a rain jacket, with his back propped against the trunk of a large variform maple tree.
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