"Hang on," said a man's voice in his ear.
There were two of them, one on either side of him. He had an arm over the shoulders of each, and they each had an arm about his waist. They half-carried, half-walked him forward through a lesser thickness of people for a little distance, and then abruptly brought him back into warmth, for which he was grateful.
They had helped him up a ramp into the body of a large truck that seemed to have been fitted up as a first aid station.
"Put him there," said a woman with a stethoscope hanging from her neck, who was working over someone on a cot. Her elbow indicated an empty cot behind her.
Gently, the two men carrying Hal put him down on the cot.
"See if anyone outside knows him," said the woman briefly. "And shut the door as you go out."
The two went. Hal lay basking in the warmth and the growing joy of being free. After a while, the medician with the stethoscope came over to him,
"How do you feel?" she asked, putting her fingers on his wrist at the pulse-point.
"Just weak," said Hal. "I wasn't in the crowd. I just got away from a Militia ambulance. They were taking me to the hospital."
"Why?" said the woman, reaching for a thermometer.
"I had a bad cold. A chest cold, that went into bronchitis, or something like that."
"Are you asthmatic?"
"No." Hal coughed thickly, looked around for something to spit into, and found a white tray held under his nose. He spat; and the sensor-end of the thermometer was tucked beneath his tongue for a moment, then was withdrawn.
"No fever now," said the woman. "But you're still wheezing. You're not moving air well."
"Yes," said Hal. "The last few days. I had a pretty high fever, I think, but it broke early this morning.''
"Roll up your sleeve," she said, producing a pressure gun and thumbing an ampoule into it. His fingers fumbled clumsily with the fastening of his sleeve cuff, and she laid the gun aside to pull loose the cuff closure and push the sleeve up. He watched the nose of the pressure gun pressed against his upper arm, felt the coolness of a drug being discharged into the muscle, and himself rolled his sleeve down and fastened it once more.
"Drink this," said the woman, now holding a disposable cup to his lips. "Drink it all."
He swallowed something that tasted like weak lemonade. Less than a minute later a blissful miracle took place, as his lungs opened up, and shortly thereafter he became busy coughing up large amounts of the secretions that had clogged his constricted air passages.
The door to the truck by which he had been brought in opened and closed again.
"—Of course I know him," a voice was saying as it approached him. "He's Howard Immanuelson, one of the Warriors in Rukh's Command."
Hal looked and saw the round, determined face of one of Gustav Mohler's grandsons from the Mohler-Beni farm, coming toward him with a man behind him who might have been one of those who had carried Hal in earlier.
"Are you all right, sir?" the grandson asked. Hal had never known his name. "Is there someplace I can take you to? I drove in earlier this week in one of our trucks, and I can bring it around in a moment. You needn't worry, sir. We're all faithful people of God, here!"
A blush stained his skin on the last words. Hal appreciated for the first time that the urging of the truck driver with the accordion that Hal be put off from the Command, that evening at the Mohler-Beni farm, might have been a source of embarrassment to their host and his family.
"I don't doubt it," he said.
"He can't go like that," said the medician sharply, from another stretcher at which she was working, "unless you want him back down with pneumonia, again. He needs some outdoor clothing. Somebody out there ought to be able to spare a jacket or a coat for a Warrior of God."
The man who had come in with the grandson ducked back out of the truck.
"Don't worry, sir," said Mohler's grandson, "there's lots of people who'll be glad to give you a coat. Maybe I'd better go get the truck and bring it here so you don't have so far to walk to it."
He went out, leaving Hal to wonder if someone out there would actually be willing to give away an outer garment and expose himself or herself to the temperature Hal had just felt, at the request of someone else who was probably a stranger.
However, the man came back before Mohler's grandson had a chance to return; and his arms were filled with half a dozen coats and jackets. Left to himself, Hal would have taken any one and been grateful for it; but the medician took charge and picked out a jacket with a fleece lining that wrapped him with almost living warmth.
"Thank whoever gave it, for me," said Hal, to the man who had brought it.
"Sir, he's already thanked," said the man, "and proud that a member of Rukh's Command would wear a garment of his."
He left with the rejected coats. A moment later, Mohler's grandson came in and helped Hal out to a light truck that was now standing in the street beside the first aid truck, surrounded by a considerable crowd that broke into applause as Hal came out, his elbow steadied by the young man.
Hal waved and smiled at the crowd, let himself be helped into the other truck, and sat back exhaustedly in his seat as the grandson lifted the vehicle on its blowers and the crowd made a lane before it to let it move off.
"Where to, sir?" asked the grandson.
"To—I'm sorry, I don't know your name," said Hal.
"Mercy Mohler," said the other, solemnly.
"Well, thank you, Mercy," said Hal. "I appreciate your identifying me; and believe me when I say I appreciate this ride."
"It's nothing," said Mercy, and blushed again. "Where to?"
Hal had put his memory to work to turn up the address he had written on the mailing envelope containing his papers. Nothing that he wanted to remember was ever forgotten; but sometimes it required a certain amount of mental searching to turn it up. At the last minute, he changed slightly what his memory had given him. There was no need to advertise the fact he was going to the Exotic Consulate.
"Forty-three French Galley Place," he said. "Do you know where that is? Because all I have is the address."
"I'll ask," said Mercy.
He stopped the truck, lowered the window at his shoulder and put his head out to speak to those in the crowd immediately outside. After a second, he brought his head back in, put up the window and restarted the truck.
"French Galley's right off John Knox Avenue, below the First Church," he said. "I know where that is. We'll be there in ten minutes."
But it took closer to twenty minutes than ten, before French Galley Place was found. It turned out to be a circle of very large, comfortable three-storey houses; and, seeing the flags displayed on various of the doorsteps, Hal realized that the Place itself was evidently a favorite location in Ahruma for off-world Consulates. So much for hiding the fact that he had been heading for a diplomatic destination. A somewhat puzzled Mercy dropped him off before a relatively smaller, brown establishment between what were obviously the Venus and New Earth Consulates.
"Thanks," said Hal, climbing out. "I can't thank you enough. No thanks, I can manage fine by myself. Let me see you safely on your way now—and say hello for me to your grandfather and the rest of your family when you get home."
"It's been my pleasure—and an honor, sir," said Mercy; and put the window up between them, before waving and driving off.
Hal waved back and watched the truck continue around the traffic circle on which the houses of the Place were built, and disappear between the trees on either side of the entrance into Knox Avenue. He breathed out, heavily. Merely being polite had drained his small supply of strength.
He turned, and walked slowly and unsteadily around the circle to sixty-seven French Galley Place, four doors away. The walk in from the gate was a short one, but the six steps leading up to the front door were like a small mountain to climb. He reached the top at last, however, and pressed the annunciator button. There was a wait that stretched out to several mi
nutes. He was about to signal the annunciator again when its grille spoke to him.
"Yes?" said a voice from within.
"My name is Howard Immanuelson," he said, wearily leaning against the doorframe. "A few days ago I sent some papers—"
The door before him opened. A figure hardly shorter than his own, in a saffron-colored robe but with a full-fleshed, round and ageless face stood framed in the relative darkness of the interior.
"Of course, Hal Mayne," said a soft, baritone voice. "Amid asked us to do whatever we could for you; and said that you'd be along shortly. Come in, come in."
Chapter Thirty-eight
Hal lay, his long body clad in a forest-green Exotic robe, listening to the interweaving of the melody of birdsongs with the sound of a fountain beyond a screen of three-meter-tall, willow-like trees, to the left of the small, depressed sitting area, like a conversation pit, in which he was resting. The harmony that existed in all surroundings created by Exotic minds was soothing to the remnants of a tension that still lived deep inside him. Above, either blue sky or that same sky with a weather screen between himself and it, flooded everything about him with the distant, clear green-tinted light of Procyon A, which shared its energy not only with this world of Mara, but with its twin Exotic planet of Kultis, as well as with the smaller inhabited worlds of St. Marie, half again the distance of Mara out from that sun, and Coby.
He had been reading, but the capsule had dropped from his fingers into his lap, and the words printed on the air before him had vanished. He felt soaked through by that dreamy lethargy that continues to stain for days human bodies recovering from severe illness or great and prolonged physical effort; and his present surroundings, one of those Exotic homes in which it was often uncertain as to whether he was indoors or out, lent itself to a feeling that all eternity was available in which to do anything that needed to be done. At the same time, with the recovering of his strength, a note of urgency, that had kindled in him in the Militia cell, had been growing in insistence.
Something in him had sharpened. He had aged swiftly, these last few weeks. He was not likely now to imagine—as he might have, six months earlier—that the Exotics had smuggled him off Harmony to Mara, here, merely out of kindness or because of a private concern on Amid's part. In principle, the Exotics were kind; but, above all, they were practical. There would be further developments resulting from all this care and service; and, in fact, he welcomed them, for he, himself, had things to talk to his hosts about.
He had not seen Amid except for a few brief visits since he had arrived here, at Amid's home. Before that, from the moment in which he started off-Harmony, his contact had been almost solely with a woman named Nerallee, Outbond to Consulate Services on Harmony. She had been his companion and nurse on the voyage here. Lately now, as he had grown stronger, Nerallee had been less and less in evidence. He felt the sadness of a loss, realizing that she must, of course, soon be returning to her duties on that Friendly World; and that there was little likelihood that he or she would ever meet again.
He lay now, reconstructing the ways by which he had got here. When the door of the Exotic Consulate in Ahruma had opened for him, those within had simply led him to a room and let him sleep for a while. His memory recalled no drugs given to him; but then, while the Exotics had no objection in principle to using pharmacological substances, they preferred to do so only as a last resort. More to the point, he could remember no specific treatment or manipulation of mind or body. Only, the bed surface beneath him had been exactly of the proper texture and firmness, the temperature had been exactly as he would have wished, and the gently moving air about him had been infinitely warm, soft, and enfolding.
He had woken, feeling some return of strength. Staff members of the Consulate had given him quantities of different, pleasant liquids to drink, then padded and dressed him to resemble the tall, portly Exotic who had greeted him at the door.
Nerallee had been involved with him from the first moment; and it was Nerallee who had finally accompanied him out of the Consulate to a closed, official vehicle. This had then delivered them through special diplomatic channels past the usual customs and passport checks, directly to an Exotic-owned ship in the fitting yards, where Nerallee and the supposedly ill Consulate member she had in charge were ushered aboard.
Hal could not remember the ship lifting from Harmony's surface. He did recall the first few ship-days of the trip, but only as long periods of sleep, interrupted only briefly by moments in which Nerallee was always with him and encouraging him to eat. He recovered enough, finally, to realize that she had never left him, ship's-night and ship's-day, from the beginning; and that whenever he had woken he had found her in the bed beside him. So, simply and easily, without consciously thinking about it, he had fallen half-way in love with her.
It was a small, wistful, transitory love, which both understood could not last beyond the short time they would have together. Clearly Nerallee was a Healer, in the Exotic tradition, and making herself totally available to him was part of her work. Clearly, also, she had fallen in love with him in return, finding something in him beyond what she had discovered in any other of those before who had needed her ability to repair their bodies, minds and souls—he read this in her even before she told him that it was so.
But, even with her experience and training, she found herself incapable of telling him what it was about him that was different, although they talked in depth about this, as well as many other things. It was part of the requirements of what she did, to open herself to those she ministered to as fully as she attempted to bring them to open themselves to her. One of the things she did tell Hal was that, like all those in her work, she grew—and expected to grow—within herself, with each new person she helped; and that if ever she should become unable to do this, she would have to give up what she did.
Even lying here, listening to fountain and bird-song after several weeks of almost constant association with her, Hal had trouble summoning up in his mind's eye a clear image of her face. Following nearly three hundred years of concern with genetics, there was no such thing as an Exotic who was not physically attractive in the sense of possessing a healthy, regular-featured face and body. But for what Nerallee looked like beyond that, Hal's physical perception had become too buried under his other knowledges of her to tell. She had seemed to him unremarkable, at first, almost ordinary-looking in fact, during their first few days together, but after that from time to time she had appeared to have worn so many different faces that he had lost count. Those faces had ranged from the most dramatic of beauties to a gentle, loved familiarity that washed all ordinary notions of beauty away—the familiarity that finds the faces of parents responded to so strongly by their very young children, or the appearance of a partner who has been close for so long that there is no single memory-picture possible and the person is simply recollected in totality.
But she had been able to do for him what he had so badly needed without having realized that he needed it—absorb his attentions so wholly that she could give him rest. A rest of the sort that he had not known since the death of his tutors. It had been what he had required at the time. But, with his strength now recovered, he was no longer in desperate need of it; and, therefore, Nerallee would be going elsewhere, to others who needed her.
He lay listening to the bird voices and the tinkle of splashing water.
After a while there was the faint scuff of foot-coverings on the floor above the conversation pit, behind him. He turned his head to see Amid coming down the three steps into the pit, to take a seat facing him, in what appeared to be a rock carved armchair-fashion. Hal sat up on the couch on which he had been lying.
"So, we're going to have a chance to talk, finally?" Hal said.
Amid smiled and folded the rust-colored robe he was wearing around his legs. On each of the half-dozen earlier occasions that he had appeared, the former Outbond had spent only a few minutes with Hal before leaving, on the excuse that he had a g
reat deal to do.
"The business I've been occupied with," the small, wrinkle-faced old man said, "is pretty well taken care of now. Yes, we can talk as long as you like."
"Your business wouldn't have been caused by my visit here?" Hal smiled back at him.
Amid laughed out loud. In accordance with his age, the sound resembled a dry chuckle, rather than a laugh; but it was a friendly sound.
"You could hardly come to Mara," he said, "without involving us with the Others, even if indirectly."
"Indirectly?" Hal echoed.
"Indirectly, to begin with," said Amid. His face sobered. "I'm afraid you're right. For some days now it's been directly. Bleys knows you're here."
"Here? At this place of yours?"
"Only that you're on—possibly in this hemisphere of Mara," said Amid. "Your exact location on this world is something he'd have no way of finding out."
"But I take it he's putting on pressure to get all of you to give me up to him?" Hal said.
"Yes." Amid nodded. "He's putting on pressure; and I'm afraid we'd have to give in to him, if we kept you here long enough. But we don't necessarily have to react right away. For one thing, it'd be rather beneath the dignity of one of our worlds to give in at once to a demand like that, in any case."
"I'm glad to hear that," said Hal.
"But not particularly surprised, I take it," said Amid soberly. "I gather you realize we've got a particular interest in you, and things to discuss because of it?"
Hal nodded.
"I suppose you've connected me with the calculations Walter InTeacher had run on me when he first became one of my tutors?" he said.
"That," said Amid, "of course. Your records were flagged at that time as someone who might be of force historically. Consequently, a record was kept on you that went without interruption until the deaths of your tutors and your entrance into the Final Encyclopedia—"
"Kept with Walter's help?" Hal said.
Amid gazed at him for a moment.