by Matt
"And if the Aalaag kill everything on Earth, including every woman, man and child—then that ends the Pilgrim, too?"
"Except that the Aalaag would remember him," said Shane. "He'd be with them forever, then, like a ghost in then-own minds."
He raised himself suddenly on an elbow, staring down into the area of shadow that was her face.
"You know," he said, "they can't afford any more ghosts. They've got too many already."
For a long second she did not answer.
"You mean the other races they've done things to?" she said.
"No. The ghosts of the things they've done to themselves. They've only got a shred of faith in themselves left, and it all depends on their keeping to their original plan of winning back their own worlds—though they never will."
She said nothing for even a longer period this time.
"How do you know they never will?" she asked.
"Because they know it. I can smell that knowing in Lyt Ahn, and some of the others; and it has to be the basis of the madness in Laa Ehon. But they've got no choice but to go on as if someday they'll walk on their own worlds again."
She sighed softly.
"And none of this helps us."
He lay down again on his back, staring at the ceiling.
"None of it," he said.
They went back into silence, lying close together.
As the small clockface on the bedside table next to Shane moved its hands within a couple of minutes of two, Shane rose, put on the light and began to dress. Maria had gotten up a moment after he did and was dressing on the other side of the bed. When her eye caught his, she smiled.
The military-looking cargo plane that was carrying them was apparently making a shipment of a large unit of some complex medical equipment; whether an actual, already arranged shipment, or one invented for the purpose of carrying Shane, he did not know and it really did not matter. He and Maria were given white overalls to wear so that they were dressed like the other four attendants who accompanied the equipment.
But they had nothing to do but sit and wait out the ride in a couple of reclining seats. Shortly after takeoff, Maria dozed off and soon was deep in slumber. Shane watched her sleep with a satisfaction he could not define. He himself had no sleepiness. He felt no desire for it, as if he would never need to sleep again.
They landed at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport shortly after dawn of a gray, overcast November morning that promised rain, or more likely, snow. A large, dark blue, four-door sedan pulled up to the cargo hatch of the plane. Shane and Maria left their fellow passengers for the car's padded interior, grateful for its warmth after even a few moments of exposure to the wind and chill outside.
They were taken to an office building in downtown Minneapolis and an elevator carried them to its twelfth floor. From here they could look between other buildings down into the open square that had been created by the Aalaag before the House of Weapons when that Headquarters had been built. From the tall windows through which they gazed, they could see the square thronged with tiny figures in pilgrim robes and carrying staves. Above, they, themselves, were in some sort of boardroom with a long table and comfortable chairs around it. Peter was there, also, having gone on ahead of them. But, among the half-dozen other men and women in the room, none was either Mr. Wong or Mr. Shepherd.
Nor were any of them in pilgrim robes. Shane smiled a little grimly, looking at them, and he felt his hand taken by Maria. A fraction of a second later her shoulder and hip touched against him.
"It's the ones down there who count," she whispered to him.
He nodded and looked again down at the square. More of the robes of those there, made tiny by distance, were of gray —almost the gray of the concrete underfoot—than anything else. But every other color was also represented, mixed among the gray. They would be homemade, a good share of those robes.
At first distantly, then coming on him with a rush, he felt an identification with those at whom he looked. Once more he felt the presence of the Pilgrim. The hair rose on the back of his neck and head, and a chill shuddered through him. He knew that now, if he looked up from the square, he would see—or believe he saw—the shadow of the Pilgrim towering over the House of Weapons.
Someone moved up to stand beside him on the other side from Maria.
"Do you see him?" asked the voice of Peter.
"No," said Shane, still keeping his gaze fixed on the square.
"Neither can anyone else, here," said Peter savagely. "But he's there. I want you to hear something, Shane. Tum around, would you, for a moment? Sender! Milt Sender, would you step over here for a moment?"
Shane turned back into the room, Maria letting go of his arm necessarily as he did so, but staying close enough to touch him. A small, lean man in his fifties with a sharp face and hair that was black, straight and thinning over a round skull, came up to them. His voice was surprisingly sharp and penetrating.
"What is it? I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. Evert and Miss—Casana, is it?"
"Yes," murmured Maria.
"Shane, Milt Sender is one of our crowd psychologists. Milt," said Peter, "tell Shane what you told me—about the simultaneity of the gatherings."
"Yes," said Sender, turning his gaze and his incisive voice on Shane, "it's curious, but there seems to be some sort of unconscious consensus at work around the world. That crowd down in front of the alien Headquarters is close to the boiling point. But all around the planet, wherever there's another alien Headquarters—day or night, it seems to make no difference —there's a very equal crowd at just about the same emotional point. As I say, it's interesting. As I say, it's most interesting. Almost as if they were hooked together by some sort of telepathy."
Shane said nothing.
"It's the Pilgrim," said Peter, the savagery still in his voice but that emotion now mixed with satisfaction. Sender shrugged.
"For God's sake, tell him, Shane!" said Peter. "Make him understand!"
"That isn't my job," said Shane. "If he doesn't react, he doesn't."
"It's not my job to react," said Sender, "it's my job to observe—and draw conclusions."
"Then you're a fool," said Peter, swinging away from the smaller man. "Shane, when do you want to be escorted to the Headquarters?"
"Any time now," said Shane. "If you don't mind, is there another room here where I can talk to Maria privately for a moment, before I go?"
"Certainly," said Peter. "Come with me."
Shane and Maria followed him out of the room they were in and through the next door down on the same side of the hall outside. They stepped into the deep brown-gold carpeted private office of someone evidently earning a very large salary. In front of the window wall there was a high-backed leather armchair and a desk, looking into the room, but everything else there was expensively furnished more in the style of someone's idea of a comfortable den or library.
"Pick up the phone and push the red button on the phone stand when you're ready to go," Peter told Shane, and left them.
As the door closed behind him, Shane turned and reached out. She came into his arms; and they held tight together, without a word.
"Go with Peter," he told her, after a bit. "Stay with him. That way, I'll be able to find you."
"—When you come back," she said.
"—When I come back," he repeated.
The words went away from them and were lost against the laden bookshelves of the room.
"Whither thou goest I will go," she said.
He smiled sadly. "I'm supposed to say that."
"No," she said, "it's the woman—it's Ruth who says it in the Bible."
"But I'll be coming to look for you, not the other way around."
She gazed unvaryingly at him.
"Whither thou goest," she repeated, "I will go. Oh, Shane!"
She held him fiercely to her and they simply stood there, wrapped up in each other for a long while, saying nothing because there was nothing to say that would m
ake any difference. Finally, he pulled away from her, having to use real strength to break the clasp of her arms.
"I'll have to go," he said.
"Yes." She let her arms drop to her sides. They did not bother with the phone, but went out of the room and back into the one from which Peter had taken them a little earlier.
"Everybody's ready," he said. "We'll take you right to the first line of Interior Guards, Shane, then it's up to you. You'll both find robes on the chairs behind you, there. You'd better get into them now—we've got one you can unzip and get out of in a hurry, Shane, when you get to the line of Guards. That is, if you need or want to."
"I will," said Shane.
He and Maria turned, found the robes and put them on. Shane's robe fastened down the front with long strips of Vel-cro, rather than the zipper Peter had seemed to have in mind. Shane was grateful. It would be even more certain to get out of quickly than one with a mechanical closure that might jam at the crucial moment; as easy to get out of as a bathrobe.
Their robes were gray and so was the robe Peter now put on. When they reached the street-level lobby, they saw that the six men waiting for them there wore robes of the same shade.
The first breath of outside air chilled Shane's lungs as they stepped through the glass doors of the building and onto the sidewalk. Street traffic was almost nonexistent, but the sidewalks and to a certain extent the street itself was full of a quiet river of people dressed as pilgrims with staves, and headed in the direction of the square. From them, as they passed, Shane sensed the excitement he had noticed on landing last in London, compounded by a tinge of the savagery he had felt in Peter upstairs. He felt it, and he felt the presence of the Pilgrim once more.
They were bundled into a personalized van that was equipped with carpeting and soft seats for them all. The van pulled from the curb and nosed its way among the pedestrians toward the Headquarters, until the thickness of the crowd made further traffic by vehicle impractical.
"Right," said one of the six men, sitting up front next to the driver. "We get out here then."
They left the van and joined the crowd. The robe Shane wore did not have the advantage of alien technology, and he felt the cold through it. The sky was dark and heavy with a low-hanging cloud bank solid overhead that threatened snow, and the wind blew icily in their faces. It occurred to Shane that Maria, beside him, would also be feeling the cold, and he put his arm around her as they went.
They were in the square by this time, enclosed by the pilgrim-figures already there. As they went forward the crowd became thicker, until their escorts had to ask to be let through.
"We've got one of our leaders here, to talk to the officer in charge of the Guards," they said. "Let him through, please, let him through "
They got through. Under the force of the bodies crowding in on them, Maria was pressed ever closer to Shane until it seemed they had become one person moving with a single will and mind. They were very close to the line of black-uniformed Guards and the silver-coated wall before them, unbroken now, for the protective shield had flowed down even over the entrance. The guards were in a depth of three lines, each of which stretched the full width of the building. They each held the latest thing in a machine pistol that human technology had devised before the Aalaag came. Each weapon was fed directly from a bandoleer around the large shoulder and chest of each Guardsman, a bandoleer holding nearly two thousand rounds of bullets, small and light, without much penetrating power but so poisoned that to have the skin broken anywhere on the body by one of these missiles meant certain and almost instant death. Word of the weapons had been advertised to all humans by the Aalaag when the Interior Guard was formed.
Behind the three lines and at the top of the steps leading to the entrance to the Headquarters, now invisible under the silvery screen extended to cover it, stood their human officers in a clump, talking.
The six escorts, with Shane, Maria and Peter in their midst, had pushed their way through the crowd until their leading two men were face-to-face with the first line of Guardsmen. They could take Shane no farther. He turned to Maria and put his arms around her for a last time.
She held to him, even when, at last, he tried to pull away.
"Maria," he whispered to her. "I have to go. I have to!"
"I'm trying to let you go!" she whispered back. "I just don't want to—I can't—"
Suddenly she wrenched her arms from around him and backed away the few inches their escort had won for them from the crowd.
"Go now," she said. "No, don't touch me again. Go!"
He could not bear the look in her eyes. He felt a hand clasp his shoulder briefly. "See you on the other side," said Peter's voice in his ear.
He turned from that voice and Maria's eyes toward the Guardsmen and pushed his way half a step forward as one of the escorts in front of him slipped back into the spot Shane had occupied a second before.
"Get back there!" said the Guardsman with whom he stood now face-to-face.
Shane ignored him. Instead of answering the man, he raised his voice and shouted, in Aalaag, toward the knot of officers.
"Officer-beasts! Attention! Come!"
He had deliberately chosen Aalaag commands that even an ordinary Guardsman was likely to have heard at some time or other from one of the aliens; and any officer would of course understand them. The heads of the men talking came up and around. They stared at the crowd and one who wore the collar tabs of a colonel pushed past the rest to look out at the crowd.
"Who was that who yelled at us, just now?" the colonel shouted back in English. "Identify yourself!"
Shane waved a hand over his head; and a slow, swelling, angry mutter began in the ranks of the pilgrims behind and around him.
"I am a courier-translator for the First Captain!" he shouted back, still in Aalaag—and dodged past the Guardsman before him, who now made no effort to stop him. "I must get to the First Captain!"
Of these last Aalaag words the only ones he could be sure the officers would understand were the terms "courier-translator" and "First Captain," but these should suffice. And they did.
"Let him through!" shouted the colonel, as Shane slipped forward between the other two lines of Guardsmen and the mutter behind him rose to a roar.
Shane reached the knot of officers and ripped open his robe along the Velcro-sealed parting to show the white oversuit he sometimes wore when on formal duty inside the House of Weapons.
"I'm to see Lyt Ahn as soon as possible," he gasped.
"Call in," said the colonel to a lieutenant at his elbow. But the junior officer already had his wrist communicator to his lips; and was speaking into it. A moment later the lieutenant nodded.
"He can go in," the lieutenant reported to the colonel.
In the same moment the silver curtain vanished from before the doors to the House of Weapons. Shane went forward and the doors opened before him. He stepped into the interior of the building in which he had been based for three years.
He glanced back over his shoulder and the doors had closed behind him. Suddenly all the outside noise was gone. Out there, the shining protective curtain would once more be hiding them from the sight of Peter, Maria, and the rest of those in the crowded square. He turned right and went toward the wing of the structure holding the offices and living quarters of Lyt Ahn.
30
A few steps down the corridor, he came to a difference from his last visit. It was a desk with an Interior Guardsman and a sign-in "book." The book was simply a screen inset in the desktop, which—touched by Shane's finger—identified him.
Shane nodded to the Guardsman, who nodded back without saying anything further. He was one of the tallest of the humans drafted into that Corps—Shane guessed that, standing, he would be at least seven feet tall. A right leg stiffly extended in a white cast explained why he was at this desk job when his fellows were at arms. But the smallness of his head and the roundness of his face gave a youthful, innocent look to features that to Sh
ane looked a little pale, and certainly somber.
The corridors Shane passed through on his way to Lyt Ahn's offices were empty. This was not surprising. Under the present conditions the Aalaag in the House of Weapons would all be either on duty or standing by, ready to go on. As for all the human servants, they would be taking every opportunity to keep out of the sight of their masters; in case one of the aliens should be angry because of the disturbance outside and in a mood to take it out on any human that he or she came across.
The walls about him as he went seemed to enclose him in silence and solidity, shutting out all that was happening beyond them. Here was the separateness of the Aalaag. Inside this Headquarters, the rioting of the subject race on a whole planet was nothing but a summer storm that, in a few minutes on the temporal scale within, would blow itself out and be gone.
Little by little, the familiar effect of the place began to take control of him. In his own mind once more he shrank in size, became fragile and less than those who called themselves his owners. He no longer felt the presence of the Pilgrim looming above the House of Weapons, only that little part of the Pilgrim that he carried within him and of which he was now conscious. He turned a corner and came unexpectedly upon a small group of young Aalaag officers, not in armor, but wearing the archaic harness over their ordinary working clothes that would support the armor's weight if they were required to put it on in a hurry. They were clustered together watching a large wall screen that showed the three lines of Interior Guard outside and the crowd beyond, from a viewpoint that seemed to be the equivalent of a couple of stories up, in the center of the front wall of the building. As far as Shane could read the tiny signals that marked Aalaag emotion, they radiated a pleased excitement like that of a group of humans watching a sporting event.