The Final Encyclopedia

  For less than a second the thin, foul-smelling bundle of rags he held in his arms could have been someone other than Rukh. She was almost skeletal; bruises and half-healed lacerations and burns had distorted her features and her hair was matted with filth. But her dark eyelids, which had closed against the light as he stepped through the doorway, opened slowly, and the brown eyes that looked up at him were untouched and unchanged

  With effort, her dry lips parted. Barely, he heard the whisper that came from her.

  "I testify yet to thee, my God."

  A memory of a day in which he had stood to his neck in water, looking through the screening branches of a waterside bush, returned to Hal. Through the delicate tracery of brown twigs and small green leaves, he remembered seeing in the distance—now, for the first time, clearly—three old men on a terrace, surrounded by young men in black with long barrelled pistols and a very tall, slim man; and his arms pressed the body he held close to himself, tenderly and protectively, as if it was something more precious than the universe could know. Deep within him, the breath of coldness that had woken in him momentarily in Athalia's outer office came back, coalesced to a point, and kindled into icy fire.

  "Here," he said, putting Rukh gently into Jason's arms. "Take her out of here; and give me your rifle."

  His hand closed about the small of the butt of Jason's power rifle, as the other man handed it to him. The feel of the polished wood against his fingers was strange—as if he had never touched such a thing before—and at the same time, unforgettably familiar and inescapable. He holstered his own power pistol and turned to one of the others who carried a rifle.

  "And yours…" he said

  He grasped the second rifle in his other hand and looked again at Jason.

  "If I'm not outside with the rest of you when you've loaded the trucks," he said, "don't wait for me."

  He turned and went off before Jason had time to question him. He heard the footsteps of the others begin and follow. But the sound of their feet died away quickly behind him, for he was moving with long strides, up the stairs, out of the cell block and through the entrance room. He passed the final observer there without answering her as she tried to question him about the still-bound Militiaman, and went on up the corridor beyond.

  The chart he had studied of the Center's interior layout was burned sharply into his memory. As he approached the next to last observer she stared at him and at the two rifles he carried nakedly, one in each hand.

  "Monitoring equipment from the yard just called to say they think a party's been sent from the front of Center to deal with us—" she began.

  "Jason and the rest have Rukh," he interrupted, without breaking stride. "Go with them as soon as they reach you."

  He continued straight down the corridor, parting company with the cable, which here made a ninety degree turn into a cross corridor, on its way back to the kitchen and its exit.

  "But where are you going, Hal Mayne?" the observer called after him.

  He did not answer; and the echoes of her question followed him down the corridor.

  He went on, following the chart in his head now, turning at the second cross corridor he came to, heading toward the front of the building. Inside him, the point of coldness was expanding, spreading out through all his body. All his senses were tuned to an acuteness wound to the edge of pain. He saw and remembered each crack and jointure in the walls that he passed. He heard the normally silent breathing of air in the ventilating system through the gratings in the ceiling beneath which he stepped. His mind was focused on a single point that ranged ahead of him, reaching through the walls and corridors between the Center's front offices, where the majority of the black-clad Militia would be, their officers with them and Amyth Barbage, among those officers.

  Now, the coldness possessed him totally. He felt nothing—only the purpose in him. He turned into a new corridor and saw, ten meters down it, three Militiamen pushing a small, wheeled, power cannon in his direction.

  He walked toward them, even as they suddenly noticed him and stopped in stunned silence to stare at him, striding toward them. Then, as one of them roused at last and reached for the power cannon's firing lever, the rifles in his hands roared briefly, the one in his left hand twice—like the coughings of a lion—and the three men dropped. He walked up to them, past them, and on toward the front of the building.

  "Report!" rapped a harsh voice from a speaker grille in the ceiling of the corridor. "Sergeant Abram—report!"

  He walked on.

  "What's happening there, Sergeant? Report!" cried the speaker grille, more faintly over the increasing distance between it and him. He walked on.

  He was all of one piece, now; with the coldness in him that left no room for anything else. Turning into another corridor he faced two more Militiamen and cut them down also with his rifles; but not before one of the counter discharges from the power pistols both carried cut a smoking gash in the jacket sleeve of his upper left arm. He smelled the odor of the burned cloth and the burned flesh beneath, but felt no heat or pain.

  He was getting close to the front of the building; and the corridor he was on ended a short distance ahead in another cross corridor. Already, there was a difference in what he saw around him. The doors, that were now of glass, to the dark offices he passed had become more widely separated, indicating that the rooms they opened on were larger than those he had passed earlier. Half a dozen steps from its end, the corridor he was in abruptly widened, its walls now faced with smooth stone where up to this point they had been merely of white-painted concrete. The floor had also changed, becoming covered with a pattern of inlaid gray tiles in various shapes, highly polished; and his footsteps rang more sharply upon this new surface. To the abnormal acuteness of his vision, under the now-hidden but even brighter illumination from overhead, the invisible atmosphere about him seemed to quiver like the flesh of a living creature.

  He had been moving under the impetus of something neither instinct nor training, which directed him from the back, hidden recesses of his mind. Now he felt this impetus, like a hand laid on one of his shoulders, stop him, turn him and steer him into one of the dark offices. He closed the door behind him and stood to one side in the interior shadows, looking out through the transparency of the door at the empty corridor ahead.

  For a few seconds he heard and saw nothing. Then, from a distance there came a growing sound that was the hasty beating of many feet, rapidly approaching; and, within a minute, fully a dozen fully-armed Militiamen burst into sight around a corner of the cross corridor and ran past him back the way he had come. He let them go. When they were out of sight, he stepped back into the passageway, and continued, turning left into the cross corridor in the direction from which they had just come.

  A short dogleg in this direction, and then another turn, brought him to a final cross corridor busy with men in black uniforms hurrying back and forth between doorways. These glanced at him puzzledly as he walked among them; but no one stopped him until he came at last to an open doorway on his left, looked in, and saw a large room with a long, fully-occupied conference table and blackout curtains over tall windows in a far wall. Two Militiamen privates with cone rifles stood guard, one on each side of the entrance; and when he turned to enter, they stepped to bar his way, the rifles snapping up to cover him.

  "Who're you—" began one of them.

  Hal struck out right and left at both men. The butt of a power rifle crashed into the forehead of one, the barrel end across the throat of the other, and they dropped. Hal stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  Those at the conference table within were already on their feet. Still moving swiftly, he saw clearly what his first glance through the doorway had made him suspect, that the uniforms of all of them there showed officer's rank.

  Two reached for holstered pistols at their belts; and the rifles in his hands coughed. They fell; and the other officers stood staring. A hand turned the doorknob from the corridor, outside.


  "Stay out!" shouted the officer at the far end of the table.

  "Where's Amyth Barbage?" Hal asked—for the man he had come to find was nowhere in the room. He continued to move as he spoke around the walls of the room, so that he could cover with his weapons not only those at the table but the closed door through which he had just come.

  No one answered. Still moving, and approaching the table, Hal swung the muzzle of the rifle in his left fist to center on the senior officer present, a squarely-built major in his fifties, at the end of the table farthest from the door, under the curtains of one of the windows.

  "He's not here—" said the Major.

  "Where?" demanded Hal.

  The Major's face had been pale. Now the color came back.

  "No one here knows," he said, harshly. "If anyone could tell you, even, it'd be me—and I can't."

  "But he's in the Center," said Hal; for Athalia's people had reported Barbage returning to the Center some hours past, and that he had not gone out again.

  "Satan take you!" said the Major. "Do you think I'd tell you if I knew?"

  But to Hal's hypersensitive hearing in this moment, there was a note of triumph in the officer's voice that convinced him not only that the other was lying and knew where Barbage was, but that something had been achieved by the other since Hal had entered the room.

  The words of the second to last observer on the cable line came back to Hal, telling him that the monitoring equipment in the kitchen courtyard had called with the suspicion that an earlier party had been sent from the front of the building to deal with the team sent out to rescue Rukh. The Major's hands were in open sight on the tabletop, but he was standing with the middle of his body pressed against the table-edge before him. Hal moved swiftly forward and knocked the man backward. Cut at an angle of forty-five degrees into the table's edge and covered until now by the bottom edge of the Major's uniform jacket was a communications panel as long as Hal's hand, but hardly wider than a ruler.

  The door to the room smashed open and armed Militiamen erupted inward.

  "Take him now!" The Major's order came out more scream than shout. Around the table, the officers who had not yet drawn their sidearms were reaching for them.

  Malachi Nasuno, or anyone who had ever had Dorsai training, could have pointed out their error. Their very numbers were the cause out of which their failure could be certainly predicted. Moving thinkingly and surely around the table, using the bodies of those who would kill or capture him as shields, Hal disabled or threw into the fire of the weapons aimed at him all those with whom he came in contact. Finally, as the room began to be empty of people still on their feet, panic took those of the Militia who were still unharmed; and there was a sudden, general rush for the still-open door.

  Hal found himself standing alone, the passage beyond the open doorway empty.

  But, caught still in the coldness that held him, he was aware that the victory was a transient one; and that the way out the still-open door was no safe escape route for him. Turning, he pointed his power pistol at one curtained window and blew out both curtain and window. The thick but ragged edge of the window material showed through the tatters of the curtain. It had been heavy sandwich glass, which would have frustrated even the energy of a power pistol at any greater distance than the point blank range at which he had used the one he held.

  He knew from the plan in his memory that the window from which he was escaping was near one end of the building's front, closest to that same side which, further back, held the courtyard and the kitchen entrance. He dropped onto concrete sidewalk, behind the line of Militia cars parked along the front curb of the street. Having landed, he stayed flat on his belly at the foot of the front wall of the Center; and had this sensible decision rewarded by hearing the whistle and pock of impacts on the wall above him, of cones fired by the resistance people in buildings across the street.

  Undoubtedly, among those rounded up to maintain a steady fire on the Center's front, there were responsible individuals who would realize that someone not in Militia uniform, exiting out a smashed window of the building, was hardly likely to be an enemy. But they would be too few and too scattered to get that understanding passed quickly to all the excited amateurs with weapons surrounding them.

  The cone rifle firing continued—but, as he had foreseen, the line of vehicles parked parallel to the curb shielded him from the direct view of the resistance people, and from any shots that came close. While his position up against the base of the wall, under the narrow outcropping of the decorative stone window ledge over which he had just come, protected him from observation and fire from above the building. Almost immediately, he began to wriggle along the base of the wall toward the corner of the building, only a few scant meters from him.

  He reached it and turned the corner. Rising to his feet he ran down the empty, lamplit street toward the lights of the kitchen courtyard.

  There was a silence about the courtyard as he got closer that made him slow his steps and begin to move more quietly, himself. There had not been time for the rest of the team to get loaded into the trucks and away, yet. He went swiftly but softly until he came to the beginning of the courtyard wall. Ignoring the gate, he found finger-cracks enough where the building wall joined that of the courtyard, climbed to the top of the wall and dropped down inside.

  The trucks were still there, close enough to him so that they blocked his view of most of the rest of the courtyard. He drew the power pistol and went with it in his hand around the back of the nearest truck… and breathed out with relief.

  The team was just now loading, ready to depart. But something—it may have been their first sight of Rukh as she now was—seemed to have impressed them to a degree he himself had not been able to, earlier. They were moving as silently as they could, and communicating by hand signals wherever possible.

  Rukh was just now being brought to the back of the nearer truck. He holstered his gun and stepped forward into the midst of them. Ignoring the astonishment of the others, to whom he must have seemed to have appeared out of empty air, he walked to the side of the stretcher on which they carried her.

  Her bearers checked themselves, just short of handing the stretcher up to those waiting to receive it, behind the raised tailgate of the truck; and Rukh herself looked up at him. The nurse they had had among those waiting with the backup team in the courtyard had possibly already given her medications to ease and strengthen her; but the eyes looking up into his were now more widely open and her voice, though still whispering, was stronger than he had heard it in the cell block.

  "Thank you, Hal," she said.

  For a moment the coldness moved back from him.

  "Thank the others," he said. "I had selfish motives; but the others just wanted you out."

  She blinked at him. Her eyes were moist. He thought she would like to say something more; but that the effort was too great. Hastily he spoke himself.

  "Lie quiet," he said. "I'm taking you clear off-planet to Mara; where the Exotics can put you back together, body and mind, as good as new."

  "Body only…" she whispered. "My mind is always my own…"

  Hal felt his right sleeve plucked. He turned and saw Athalia standing just behind him with a face shaped by cold anger. He allowed her to pull him back out of earshot of Rukh.

  "You didn't tell us anything about taking her off-world!" Athalia whispered savagely in his ear.

  "Would you have risked lives to rescue her, if I had?" he answered grimly, but with equal softness. "I told you she had a value to the whole race, above and beyond her value to all of you here on Harmony. Now that she's free, do you suppose anything less than off-planet can be safe for her, or safe for anyone who might try to hide her?"

  Athalia's hand fell from his sleeve.

  "You're an enemy, after all," she said, bitterly.

  "Ask yourself that a year from now," said Hal. "In any case, the Exotic Embassy can help get her off Harmony, which none of you can d
o; and once she's known to be on another world, the pressure from the Militia, turning you all upside down to find her, will let up."

  "Yes," Athalia said. But she still looked at him savagely as he turned away from her.

  They had begun to lift the stretcher's far end so as to pass it to those in the truck. There was a pause as they made the decision to lower the tailgate first, after all. In the moment of that pause, a voice struck at them from the kitchen entrance of the building.

  "So!" it said, hard, loud and triumphant in the silence of the lamplit courtyard, "the Whore of Abomination has friends who would try to steal her from God's justice?"

  Everyone looked. Amyth Barbage, stick-thin in his close-fitting black Militia colonel's uniform, stood alone in the entrance to the kitchen. He carried a power rifle, generally pointed at all of them; and Hal's eyes, without moving, saw that—like himself—none of the rest had weapons in hand and ready for use.

  Alone and apparently indifferent to that fact, Barbage walked three steps forward from the doorway. His power rifle pointed more directly toward the stretcher bearing Rukh, and those who stood closely around it.

  "Carry her back inside," he said, harshly. "Now!"

  The coldness returned to Hal with a rush; and from the same place that it came from in him, came other knowledge he had not known he had.

  A wordless shout that erupted like an explosion in the stillness of the courtyard tore itself from him. It came from every nerve and muscle of his being, not merely from the lungs alone, the utmost in sound of which his body was capable; and it went out like a bludgeon against the thin, white-faced man, a wall of sound directed against Barbage alone. For a moment the other seemed stunned and frozen by it; and in that same moment, Hal leaped aside from the line of aim of the Militia officer's rifle, drew his own pistol and fired.