The Final Encyclopedia

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He got to his feet, groped to the door, found its latch and opened it. He stepped into a dim corridor with light bouncing from around a corner at its far end, to faintly illuminate the walls and floor where he stood. He went toward the light, turned the corner, and stepped into the room where he had first confronted Athalia McNaughton, a room now lit from its unshaded windows with the antiseptic light of pre-dawn.

  "Athalia McNaughton?" His voice went out and died, unanswered.

  He went to the only door other than the entrance in the room, and pulled it open. Beyond was a small office stacked with papers and a tiny desk, at which Athalia was now sitting, talking into a phone screen. She switched off and looked over at him.

  "So you woke up on your own," she said. "All right, let me brief you, feed you, and put you on your way."

  When he rode out through the pipe-iron gates forty-five minutes later, beside her in a light-load truck, the Militia vehicle had vanished from the yard. He did not ask about it and Athalia offered no information. She drove without speaking.

  He had no great desire for conversation at the moment, himself. His few hours of rest had only worked to make him aware of how feverish and tired he was. With one voice, all the cells of his body cried for a chance to rest and heal themselves. The immuno-stimulants were hard at work in him, and the fever was down slightly—but only slightly. His throat and chest burned, although the overwhelming urge to cough was now controllable by methods Walter had taught him; and that was something for which he was grateful. He had no desire to draw attention to himself with the sounds of sickness that might cause anyone who came close to him to pay particular attention to him.

  Athalia had also made an offer of painkillers and ordinary stimulants. But both would interfere with his own mental control, the effects of which on his weakened body he could judge more accurately than its response to drugs; and on being refused she had turned immediately to the problems of getting him to the person who could sell him the interworld passage he needed. The man's name was Adion Corfua. He was not a native Harmonyite but a Freilander; a small shipping agent who did not sell interworld passages himself, but knew brokers from whom cancelled tickets, or those not picked up within the legal time limit, could be bought—at either a premium or a discount, depending upon the world of destination and the buyer demand.

  "I'll drive you to a point close to the terminal," Athalia told Hal. "From there you can catch a bus."

  After that, it would be a matter of his following directions to the general shipping office out of which Corfua worked.

  The morning had dawned dry and cool, with a stiff breeze, a solid cloud cover, but no prospect of rain. A gray, hard day. Just before Athalia dropped him off at the sub-terminal where he would catch the bus, she drew his attention to a compact piece of tan luggage behind his seat, the sort of case in which interworld employment contracts were carried by those who had business with them.

  "The contracts in it are all legitimate," Athalia said, "but they're from workers who've made their round trips. They won't stand up to being checked with employers; but for spot inspection, they're unquestionable. Your story should be that you're making a sudden, unexpected courier run. It'll be up to you to come up with a destination, an employer there and a situation in which contract copies are needed in a hurry."

  "Industrial sabotage," Hal said, "destroyed some files in an interworld personnel clearing house on the world I'm going to."

  "Very good," said Athalia, nodding and glancing at him for a moment, then back to the Way down which they were travelling. "How do you feel?"

  "I'll make it," he said.

  They had reached the sub-terminal of the bus line. She handed the case to him as he got out. Standing on the pavement of the sub-terminal with the case in one hand, he turned and looked back at her.

  "Thank you," he said, "remember me to Rukh and the rest of the Command when you see them."

  "Yes," she said. Her eyes had darkened again. "Good luck."

  "And to all those James sent his message to, at the end there," Hal said, "good luck."

  The words, once they were spoken, sounded out of place in the hard, prosaic daylight. She did not answer, but sat back in her seat and pressed the stud that closed the door between them. He turned away as she drove off in the truck; and walked over to stand at the point where he would be boarding the bus.

  Twenty minutes later he stood instead at the general desk of the shipping office with which Adion Corfua was connected.

  "Corfua?" said the man on the general desk. He punched studs, looked into the hidden screen before him, and then glanced off to one side of the room behind him in which a number of desks were spread around. "He's here today; but he's not in yet. Why don't you take a seat at his desk? It's the third from the wall, second row."

  Hal went over, and settled into the piece of furniture facing the indicated desk. It was not a float seat, but a straight-backed uncushioned chair of native wood, plainly designed to encourage visitors not to linger. But in Hal's present physical state, to sit at all rather than stand was a welcome thing. He sat, therefore, on the edge of dozing; and after some minutes the sound of feet beside him brought him fully awake again. He sat up to see a large, slightly overweight man in his forties with a thick black mustache and a balding head, taking the padded float behind the desk.

  "What can I do for you?" said the man who must be Adion Corfua. His smile was a minimum effort. His small blue eyes were large-pupilled and unnaturally steady as they met Hal's.

  "I need a passage to the Exotics," Hal said, "preferably to Mara. Right away."

  He lifted the contract case from the floor beside him to show briefly above desk level, and dropped it to the floor again.

  "I've got some papers to deliver."

  "What's your credit?" asked Corfua.

  Hal produced his travel envelope and extracted from it a general voucher of interstellar credit showing more than enough funds to take him to the destination named. He handed these to Corfua.

  "It'll be expensive," said Corfua, slowly, studying the voucher.

  "I know what it'll cost," said Hal; and made the effort necessary to smile at the other man, as Corfua looked over the top of the voucher at him. Athalia had told him approximately what the other should charge for a passage to Mara. In his present feverish and exhausted state he had no interest in bargaining; but to be too unconcerned about the cost of the trip would make people suspicious.

  "What's the problem?" Corfua laid the papers on his desk.

  "Some papers destroyed by industrial sabotage, there," he said. "I'm carrying replacements."

  "Oh? What papers?"

  "All I'm interested in with you," said Hal, "is finding a passage."

  Corfua shrugged.

  "Let me talk to some people," he said. He got up from behind the desk, picking up Hal's identity and voucher. "I'll be right back."

  Hal stood up also and took the papers neatly back out of the other man's hand.

  "You won't need these," he said, "and I've got a few things to do. I'll meet you at the central newsstand kiosk in the terminal, in twenty minutes."

  "It'll take longer than that—" Corfua was beginning.

  "It shouldn't," Hal said. Now that he had actually locked horns with the other man, his head was clearing and his early training was upholding and guiding him. "If it does, maybe I should find someone else. See you at the kiosk in twenty minutes."

  He turned and walked away without waiting for agreement, out of the shipping office. Once beyond its entrance and beyond the sight of anyone there, he stopped and leaned for a second with one shoulder against a wall. The spurt of adrenaline that had activated him for a moment had died as quickly. He was weak and shaky. Under the jacket of the brown business suit with which Athalia had outfitted him, his shirt was soaked with sweat. After a second he straightened up, put his papers back in their envelope and walked on.

  His greatest safety in the terminal, Athalia had not needed to te
ll him—although she had, anyway—lay in keeping moving. Standing or sitting still, he could be studied. Moving, he was only one more in a continually swarming crowd of faces and bodies that, even to trained observers, could at last all come to look very much alike.

  He moved, therefore, about the maze of internal streets, shops and buildings almost at random. Half the Spaceport Terminal was taken up by this Commercial Center, which was like a small city under one roof. The other half was an industrial complex that dealt with the maintenance, repair and housing of both visiting ships and those being worked over in the Core Tap-powered Outfitting Center, only a few kilometers away. Even after three hundred years of interstellar spaceflight, the phase-shift ships, even the smallest courier vessels, were massive, uneasy visitors to a planetary surface. Those landed here were of course completely out of sight of any of the people thronging the Commercial Center. But the awareness of their nearness, and the reminder in that of the great interstellar distances beyond Harmony's atmosphere, shrank the human self-concept and made for a Lilliputian feeling, not only with regard to the crowds filling the Commercial Center, but about the architecture and furnishings surrounding them.

  It was with this feeling, superimposed upon the protests of his ill and overextended body and joined to the nervous awareness of a hunted animal, that Hal moved about the Center. He was stripped down to a sensation of being beaten and naked in the midst of enemies, a traitor to all who had trusted him. To save the lives of those in the Command, he had taken it on himself to remove from it not only himself, but the materials for the explosive. In effect, he had betrayed the others, knowing both actions were ones Rukh would never have agreed to, if asked. Only luck could reunite the Command now with what he had carried off in the truck, and lead it to the completion of its planned mission.

  But the alternative had been death for all the rest of them; and after the self-sacrifice of James Child-of-God, Hal had found himself unable to face the prospect of more death among these people to whom he had become close.

  Perhaps he had been wrong to take matters into his own hands; but there had seemed no other choice. Only, he had never felt so alone in his life—so alone, in fact, that part of him was a little astonished that he still possessed the will to resist capture, control, and possibly death. But yet he was continuing to resist, instinctively and innately. Under his mind-numbing exhaustion, his illness and the sorrow of parting with the first humans he had come to feel deeply at home with since his tutors' deaths—under the desperation of his present situation—an instinct of resistance entirely independent of his will burned steadily with the fierceness of ignited phosphorous.

  He pulled himself from the whirlpool of his thoughts and emotions that was sucking him down into himself It was almost time to meet Adion Corfua at the central newsstand kiosk.

  He walked to the end of the interior street he was on and checked the map of the Center. He was only the equivalent of a couple of city blocks from the large central square, edged with sidewalk cafes and filled with plantings and fountains, that held the kiosk. He turned toward the square.

  A block from it, he stepped into a clothing shop to buy a blue jacket and gray beret, of the cut he had remembered seeing on New Earth, when he had transferred spaceships there on his way to Coby. Outside the shop, he discarded in a sidewalk trash incinerator the bundle containing the brown jacket he had been wearing when he had met Corfua. Slumping to reduce his height, he went on to the square and began to wander casually around it, observing the kiosk and the people clustered about it out of the corner of his eye.

  Corfua was there, standing by a wall of the kiosk and apparently absorbed in reading a news printoff he had just bought. Around the agent there was a little space with no people, the closest one being a man in a green leisure jumper who was scanning a screen with listings of book publications. Hal, who had planned to continue around the square if he had not found Corfua, turned off again up the street at the next corner. He went around that block entirely, coming back into the square at its next corner, turning back and moving in the opposite direction down the side of it he would have gone along next if he had not turned off.

  Adion was still there, still seeming to read. The man in the green jumper still scanned the screen. Around them, there was still a small area without any other person.

  Hal continued moving. Now that his suspicions had been confirmed, his eyes picked out five other individuals, four men and one woman, standing about the kiosk, who did not fit the normal patterns and movements of the crowd in the square.

  The movements of all crowds, Malachi had told him, fell into patterns which were continually changing, but only to related patterns. The old Dorsai had trained young Hal first with a kaleidoscope—a tube with a rotatable end which, when turned, rearranged triangles of color as seen through a prism—then by standing him on a balcony overlooking a shopping center square in Denver, much like this one. The day had finally come when Hal, looking down, could immediately identify all the individuals Malachi had hired to play watchers in the square. It was not by specific actions or the lack of them that Hal had come to recognize those who were anomalies within the patterns. Rather, they had come eventually to jump to his eye, subjectively; as, at first glance, in gestalt fashion, the spuriousness of a fake painting jumps to the eye of an art expert who knows intimately the work of the painter being imitated.

  Just so, now, the five men standing about the square jumped to Hal's eye from among the individuals surrounding them. There might well have been others seated at cafe tables, whom with closer study he might have picked out; but what he had now discovered was all he needed to know. He continued casually, but turned off immediately at the same corner he had turned off at before. He began to walk as swiftly as he could without attracting attention.

  Once again, the shirt under his jacket was damp with sweat—the sweat of tension and exhaustion. Clearly, the Ahruma area generally had now been warned and his picture made available to anyone selling interstellar passages—and particularly to such as Corfua, who probably worked close enough to the line of legality to be known to the local police. On recognizing him, Corfua, to save himself, would have had no choice but to alert the Militia.

  By this time the whole Commercial Center, and possibly the whole terminal, would be under observation and search for him. The only question remaining was whether he could get to the terminal entrance and escape from it before he was noticed, even in his new jacket and beret, and the searching forces closed in on him.

  He continued to walk, fast but not so fast as to attract undue attention. He passed nearly a dozen men and women whom he identified as anomalies in the patterns around him; although whether all of them were watching for him or for someone else, was anyone's guess. In a few minutes he had turned a final corner, and one of the entrances to the terminal was before him, with the front end of a line of buses to inner-city Ahruma just visible outside it.

  Four black-uniformed Militiamen were checking the papers of everyone entering and leaving through the entrance.

  He had altered course automatically, even as he saw them, so that now instead of heading directly toward the entrance, he was headed off to one side of it. He continued, increasing the angle of his change in direction as he went until his route became a curve leading him down a corridor paralleling the front face of the terminal.

  It was a temptation to tap his adrenaline reserves once more, if only for a minute or two, simply to forget briefly the physical discomforts that were clamoring for his attention. But he was aware how little his remaining strength was. Effortfully, he put aside the alluring notion of the anesthesia of self-intoxication, and set himself grimly, as he walked, to thinking the situation through in his present fogged and fever-lit mind.

  The enemy he faced, he reminded himself, was not the Militia but Bleys. The Militia was only a tool. Bleys must fear him for greater than usual reasons, or the Other Man would not have put into motion this large an effort to capture him. The
goal must be his capture, not his death; Bleys could have made sure of his destruction back on Coby by simply arranging the deaths of all those at the mines where Hal was suspected of being. From what Hal had always been given to understand, the use of such bloody means to achieve a relatively small result would not be at all out of character for one of the Others.

  Bleys, then, wanted him alive for some specific reason; therefore Hal's goal must be to either keep himself from being captured or make his capture as worthless as possible. It seemed clear that friendless, alone and ill as he was, he stood almost no chance of being able to get away from this terminal without being taken by the Militia. There were things he could and would try, but the fact of his capture had to be faced; and the question therefore was to make that capture as unrewarding as possible.

  One way he could do that was to make sure that the credit vouchers and identity papers that made it possible for him to move between the worlds were not taken if he was captured; so that if he had the luck to get free of Bleys and his people, he could regain them and with them the means to escape to another planet.

  Still struggling to think of ways to do this, he had paid little attention to where he was going, turning down streets at random. He was only half a block from the square where he had been to meet Corfua, when he suddenly caught sight of a line of black uniforms, a little less than a block distant, across the street and moving toward him.

  They were beginning to sweep the interior of the terminal—or the interior of the Commercial Center, at least—for him. The thought of the mobilization of troops required for such an effort brought home to him with a chill more clearly than anything else had done the kind of power that the Others must wield here on Harmony. Idly, he stopped to look into a shop he was passing, gazed for a second, then as idly turned and began to move back the way he had come.