The Final Encyclopedia

Without warning, Epsilon Eridani broke through the heavy weight of the clouds over them; and in its sudden rich yellow warmth, her face was clear and young and pale.

  "It'll be all right," he told her automatically.

  She reached out her hand. Their fingertips barely touched; and then she had turned and was going away, back through the woods to the Command. He watched her out of sight, then turned away himself, remembering as he did how he had turned from Child, only the afternoon before.

  He went swiftly, thinking of the next twenty-four hours, within which so much would need to be done. At the moment he had both eaten and slept recently, enough of both so that he now went easily into the familiar adrenaline overdrive he could always draw upon; and the fatigue, the rawness of his throat and chest, and the headache that had sat like an angry dog in the back of his head on and off since the fever had begun to work on him, effectively were forgotten.

  He had not staked out the donkeys individually as he had indicated to Rukh he would; though it had been necessary to lead each of them off the main trail at a different spot, so that the Militia would not realize that there had been a general exodus of the Command's animals. Trail sign of an occasional beast being led away from the line of march was not unusual. Lame or sick beasts would be taken aside before being turned loose, so that they would not be tempted to try and rejoin their fellows in the column. Once Hal had conducted an individual donkey a safe distance from the trail this time, however, he had turned and taken it to a temporary gathering spot, to be staked out there with the others he had already led away from the Command.

  It was to this place he headed now. When he got there, the donkeys were patiently grazing at the ends of their long tethers, scattered about a hollow of land screened with trees on the heights surrounding it; and Epsilon Eridani was halfway up toward the noon position overhead, in a sky furnished with only scattered clouds.

  He set to work making up his pack train. It was an advantage that the process of filling the trail packs of the Command members had reduced the total amount his animals were carrying, to the point where he now had five of the twenty-five beasts travelling completely without load and available for use as relief pack animals in case any of his loaded beasts could not go on.

  Even with that, however, and the advantage of good weather, the handling of a twenty-five animal pack train singlehanded through country like this was a monumental task. He got to work reloading his beasts with the packs he had taken off them on getting them here, and connecting them in a line with lead ropes. It took over three hours before the pack train was ready to go.

  When he did at last get under way there were some six hours left in which there would be light enough to travel. He headed almost due east, downslope toward the nearest road shown on his map, which was the closest supply artery Barbage could be using to keep his troops and equipment supplied for the pursuit. In the six hours that remained, he was able to move within half a kilometer of the road. There, he picked a resting spot very like the one in which he had left the donkeys earlier, unloaded, staked them out, and ate. He lay down in his bedsack to sleep, setting his mind to wake him in four hours.

  When he opened his eyes, Harmony's moon—as he had expected—was high in the almost cloudless night sky. The moon—called Daughter of the Lord—was half-full now, and the light it gave was more than adequate for the kind of travelling he had in mind.

  He made up a light pack with some dried food, first aid kit, ammunition and rain gear, and left his donkeys to the moonlight. Working his way the rest of the distance down to the road, he began a search back along it for one of the Militia's supply points.

  He found one within twenty minutes. At night, its two Militiamen on guard were asleep and all ordinary lights were out; but he smelled it before he saw it. Tucked into the side of the road, in an open spot, were a tent, the still red coals of a fire, and some piles of unopened cases and general debris. The odors of woodsmoke, garbage, human waste, and a medley of the smaller, technological smells of such as weapon lubricant and unwashed tarps led him directly to it.

  He took off his pack and laid his rifle aside, a few meters back in the trees, and drifted into the sleeping camp on noiseless feet. The night was so still and insect-free here in the high foothills that he could hear the heavy sleep-breathing of at least one of the men. He could possibly have lifted the tent flap in perfect safety to confirm that there were only two of them on duty there; but it was not necessary. The camp shouted forth the fact that no more than a pair of men were occupying it.

  He checked the stack of boxes, but short of opening one, there was no way to tell what was in them. The weight of the one he lifted indicated it held either weapons, weapon parts, or some other metallic equipment. The unseal-and-eat meal units on which the Militia were fed in this kind of pursuit would have been packaged up into boxes that were much lighter for their size than these, as would have medical supplies, clothing and most other deliverable items. From the look of the camp and the number of emptied meal unit cartons, it was a good estimate that these two had been holding this supply point for two days already and would be here at least another day yet. They would not be here now—they would have gone back with the last supply truck to reach them—if at least one more delivery to this supply point was not expected. Also, from the marks where the earlier deliveries had been made, at least one full day of sunshine and moisture had been at work on the indented earth where the last truck to visit had shut off its blowers and let itself settle to the ground.

  Therefore, there should be at least one truck due tomorrow.

  He looked once more about the camp, memorizing the distances between its various parts and its general layout. It was not hard to imagine how it would look and where the men involved would be when a delivery came tomorrow. Having done this, he turned and left as silently as he had come. Only a little more than an hour later, moving on a slant now that he knew the relative positions of the two points between which he travelled, he was once more with his donkeys and in his bedsack, ready for sleep.

  He woke before dawn and an hour later was squatting on the hillside a dozen meters above the supply point. He had thought it unlikely that the nearby Militia post, wherever that was, would exert itself to get a supply truck loaded and out before dawn. In any case, he found when he arrived that the two soldiers on duty there were still asleep in their tent; and he was able to listen and watch through the full ritual of their waking and breakfasting.

  That day's delivery, he gathered from their breakfast talk, was due an hour before noon and would involve three trucks. His jaw tightened. Three trucks, each with a driver and loader, plus the two Militiamen already here, would be almost too many for him to handle. Ten minutes after hearing this, however, he was on his feet and running back toward his donkeys, having just been gifted with further information. Late in the day there would be another, single truck arriving; but not to make a delivery; and for this reason the two were looking forward to it enthusiastically. It was the truck that would pick them up and return them to barracks life in Ahruma.

  The late arrival of this solitary truck offered an opportunity that had been unlikely to hope for—one that could take off some of the hardship his private plans had looked to inflict on the Command. He got back to his donkeys and went swiftly to work loading only the personal gear on as many beasts as were needed to carry it.

  Loaded and with the donkeys roped together, he started out for the rendezvous point he had settled on with Rukh.

  Left alone as he now was with the problem he faced, caught up in the machinery of the physical job involved in moving nine loaded donkeys in limited time twenty-odd kilometers to the rendezvous point he had originally set up with Rukh, and burning with the fever that had now taken firm hold of him, Hal went almost joyously into a state of self-intoxication in which all things were unreal except the relentless drive of his will.

  He had, he estimated, at best seven hours to make the round trip—to get the donkeys there
, to get them staked out and unloaded, and to return before the single truck arrived to collect the two Militiamen. It was possible only if everything went without a hitch—which was more than could be expected in the real universe—or if he could manage to move the relatively lightly loaded, if worn-out, donkeys at better than their normal pace.

  Somehow he managed to so move them; and the astonished donkeys found themselves at intervals, on downslopes and in open stretches, actually breaking into a trot. For a time that lasted into mid-day, it seemed that fortune would smile on him and not only would he make his schedule, but beat it by an hour or so.

  Then without warning, the country turned bad for pack trains. The ground became cut and seamed with gullies, heavily brushed and wooded, so that the last donkeys might be headed down a precipitous—if short—slope, with their hooves digging in to keep them from nosediving forward, while the animals in the lead would be struggling up an opposite slope that was equally steep and tangled with bushes.

  In the case of a string of beasts of necessity roped together in one long line, this kind of situation produced falls on the part of some of the loaded beasts, and unbelievable tangles. By an hour past mid-day it became clear that, barring a sudden change for the better in the terrain, he had no hope of getting his beasts to their destination and returning in time to the supply point.

  He did the next best thing. Consulting the map he had copied from Rukh's supply, he located the nearest stream, tied up his donkeys temporarily and prospected for a substitute rendezvous point along it. Having found this, he went back and brought the animals to this point, unloaded and cached the equipment they carried, then staked them out individually on "clotheslines" fastened at each end, each donkey being tethered to a slip ring that ran up and down the line, so that he could move to reach the stream and available forage.

  This done, he cut a generous handful of hair from the tail of one of the donkeys and headed for the original rendezvous. There, he tacked up bunches of the donkey hair on the trunks of several trees, with an arrow carved in the tree just below each bunch, pointing a compass direction to the substitute point where donkeys and equipment were now to be found.

  It was all he could do. Rukh and the others were not unaware that under campaign conditions few things went exactly as planned. Not finding the donkeys where they should be, they would instinctively look for them, and for clues left as to where they might be. Unless they had the Militia right on their heels and no time to stop and hunt, a reasonable investigation on their part would find the animals and equipment where he had left them; and this before the donkeys ran out of forage, or fell prey to the kind of accident that could occur to such creatures left tethered alone in the woods for several days. Hal shut his mind to the thought of how Rukh would feel on discovering no explosive among the loads he had cached with the animals.

  In any case, he had no time to do more. Leaving the established rendezvous now, he literally ran the more than twenty kilometers back to the supply point.

  He arrived no more than three-quarters of an hour later than he had originally planned. The two Militiamen were still there, although their personal gear was packed and ready for their leaving. Puzzlingly, the pile of unopened supplies was also still there; and Hal, sweating and exhausted from the past eight and a half hours of extreme exertion, was left to worry over the possibility that some of Barbage's Militiamen from the pursuit team might appear at any minute to pick them up. If half a dozen more armed men should arrive just when the truck was here to pick up the two on sentry duty, he would be facing an impossible situation.

  But there was nothing for him to do but wait; and one of the advantages of waiting was that it gave him a chance to rest before the next demand upon him. He lay on the slope, accordingly, not even bothering to keep an eye on the camp below him, since his ears gave him a clear image of what was going on down there. His only concern now was stifling the urge to cough that, now the excitement and adrenaline of his earlier exertions was over, was threatening to betray his presence to the men below.

  In the end it was necessary to use one of the techniques Walter the InTeacher had taught him for emergency control of the body's automatic processes, knowing as he did that he was further draining his strength to do so and putting himself at least partially back into the berserkedness of overdrive. But the exercise effectively silenced the cough for the present; and, after a while, his ear picked up the distant sound of blowers that signalled a truck making its way up the slope of the highway to the supply point.

  It was roughly an hour and a half late. He could, if he had known it would be this dilatory, have returned from where he had left the donkeys at no more than a good walking pace. So much for lost opportunities. An hour and a half overdue was almost to be expected in military schedule-keeping; but, he told himself, if he had counted on the truck being late, as surely as this day would end, it would have appeared on time.

  The truck came on. The two Militiamen were standing, waiting, out by the side of the road, with their packs and other gear piled behind them. The vehicle was a heavy-framed, military version of the farm trucks the Command had made use of in the Masenvale raids on the fertilizer plant and the metals storage point. It came on, stopped, turned about and backed up to the pile of boxes.

  Clearly, it was intended to take back whatever was in the boxes to the supply center. The two Militiamen who had been waiting went back to the boxes themselves, to load. Hal, holding his cone rifle in his right hand and with the flap up on the power pistol holstered on his leg, slipped down until only a small screen of bushes and some four meters of roadside dirt separated him from them. With the back of the truck open now, he could see into the cab. The driver alone was still in the truck, behind its wheel. One other Militiaman had come out of it and was helping the two who had been on duty here to load the boxes.

  Hal stepped quietly from the bushes with the cone rifle in his arms.

  "Driver, get out here!" he said. "The rest of you—stand still!"

  They had not seen him until the sharp snap of his voice brought their heads around. Inside the truck, the driver's head jerked back to look over the top of his seat. His face stared.

  "Back through the truck and stand here with the rest of them!" Hal said to him. "Be careful—don't make it look as if you're trying anything."

  "I'm not…" the driver almost stammered.

  He lifted his arms into view beside his head and worked his way clumsily between the two seats of the cab, then came back through the empty body of the truck to jump down and stand beside the other three. Hal turned his attention to the others. One was an older man. The two who had been on sentry duty were plainly only in their teens. Two pale young faces stared blankly at him with the expressionless terror of children.

  "Are you—are you going to shoot us?" one of them asked in a high voice.

  "Not yet, anyway," said Hal, "I've got some heavy work for you to do, first."

  Chapter Thirty

  "Take it between those two large trees there. Slowly," said Hal.

  The driver was seated at the vehicle's controls beside him, with the barrel-end of Hal's power pistol touching his ribs. Behind them in the body of the truck, the three other Militiamen sat against one side of it, with their hands in their laps, looking into the small dark circle that was the muzzle of Hal's cone rifle, aimed at them over the back of the seat. Except for the fact that Hal had to keep his attention at once on the route on which he was directing the driver, the driver himself, and the three in the back, the situation was almost comfortable.

  "A little farther…" said Hal. "There!"

  They emerged into the area holding the donkeys he had not taken to the rendezvous point.

  "Over there," he told the driver, and coughed harshly. "That stack covered with tarps. Bring the truck up to it, turn around and open your back doors. We'll be loading."

  The driver swung his steering knob and punched keys on his console. The truck's blowers shut off and the vehicl
e sat down on the ground. Hal herded the driver and others before him out the open rear doors onto the ground beside the pile of explosive materials.

  "All right," he said. "All of you—yes, you too, driver—start putting everything from that stack into the truck."

  It took the four of them, at gunpoint, only some twenty minutes to load what had taken Hal several hours to unload, pile, and protect from the weather. When it was all in the truck, he set his prisoners to work turning the remaining donkeys loose and shooing them out of the clearing. When the last beast had been chased off, Hal brought the men back to the truck. Leaving them standing on the ground before the open back doors, he climbed back inside alone and went forward to the driver's seat.

  Taking the driver's seat, he rested the cone rifle on the back of it, covering them.

  "Now," he said, "driver, I want your uniform, including your hat and boots. Take it off."

  The driver looked at him grayly. Slowly he began to undress.

  "Good," said Hal, when he was done. "Throw them here—all the way to me. That's right. Now, the rest of you, take off your boots and toss them in the back of the truck."

  They stared at him.

  "Boots," he repeated, moving the rifle sights from left to right across their line. "Off!"

  Slowly, they began to remove their boots. When the last piece of footwear had fallen with a thump onto the metal bed of the truck, Hal gestured once more with the cone rifle.

  "Back off across the clearing until I tell you to stop," he said.

  They backed, lifting unshod feet tenderly high above rocks, sharp twigs and spiny-leaved vegetation.

  "That'll do!" Hal called, when they were a good twenty meters from him. "Now, stay there until I leave. After that, you can make your own way back to the road and either wait for help, or go find it."

  He keyed the truck to life and lifted it on its blowers.

  "You can't just leave us out here, without boots!" the driver called. "You can't—"