“Doesn’t matter,” said Dahno. “From now on, timing’s important. We haven’t any time to waste.”
“So Sean O’Flaherty said when he met us in the auditorium,” Bleys said. “He said you’d explain him. Explain what?”
“Oh, I simply told him you might be a little suspicious of the fact he claimed to be an Other, while you’d met him as an Intern for the Council,” said Dahno. “But he actually is one of the local Others. I talked to some I trusted, earlier, and asked them to recommend someone—preferably one of our Members—who was already accredited to the Council. They came up with him; and he turned out to be a good choice. He was one of our Members who successfully amended your personal history in the Council’s files. But do you know what, Bleys? I believe he’s got a touch of hero worship where I’m concerned.”
Bleys nodded, unsurprised. For some years now, Dahno had taken over the responsibility of planting false and confusing accounts of Bleys’s earliest years in official files on other worlds; full of elegant false details, including his age at the time he had come to live with Henry and his two sons on Association.
But probably not even Dahno realized that while these spurious accounts would probably work in all data archives, the exceptions would eventually be seen through by the Final Encyclopedia and the Exotics’ information-gathering service. It was the Exotics Bleys planned to keep his eye on. They would never go along with his plans; and, while their beliefs would prevent their taking any direct personal action against him, historically they had found ways around such restrictions.
Then the thought of Dahno’s last words made him smile.
“Is this the first time that’s happened to you, Dahno?” he asked.
“No,” said Dahno. “But I can’t remember when the worshiper was Sean’s caliber. Don’t let his chattering mislead you; he’s one of the most capable recruits I’ve seen in any of our Other groups. For the moment, he thinks I’ve got all the answers. But he’ll grow out of that.”
Bleys had been watching the street behind them in the still-lit vision screen of the limousine’s backseat. He had seen three other vehicles—two kinds of van and one passenger car, none of then particularly new or otherwise remarkable—follow them out of the store parking area.
Now, as he watched, another car—a low leaf-brown electric vehicle which showed a remarkable turn of speed for the wheeled conveyance it was—was keeping up with them, having just come from one of the side ways to join them.
“Toni told me the medician said I wasn’t to ask anyone but him about your plans to get us to the spaceport,” he remarked.
“Oh, that,” said Dahno. “There’s nothing to that. The plans are much what you heard from Henry in advance. We’ll probably run into some opposition at three points—”
“Henry talked about that,” Bleys said.
“—Three points,” went on Dahno, evenly, “along the way to the spaceport, no matter what route we take; and we may have to smash our way through one—or two—or all three. But that’s to be Henry’s and the Soldiers’ job, not ours. You know everything but the details, and the details are going to be controlled by what we run into at those three points. The first is just coming up—the exit from the city to the spaceport Great Way—and the one river crossing, where we’ve got no choice but to go across a bridge. Then there’ll be the matter of the perimeter of the spaceport itself; and possibly trouble right up to the moment we’re actually inside Favored of God and off the pad. Once we’re no longer touching ground, it’s not likely the Newtonians will really dare break the Interstellar conventions by bringing in ships to force us down again. Frankly”—he looked at Bleys and chuckled—
“I don’t think they think you’re worth it—the kind of trouble that would cause them with all the other Worlds at once,” he said. “No, Kaj Menowsky just thought that you shouldn’t be stressed more than necessary until he had a chance to check you over, on the ship.”
He chuckled again.
“You do have a tendency to want to take charge of whatever you get involved in.”
There was a certain amount of truth in that, Bleys thought, and it was typical of Dahno to talk himself into a righteous position in any discussion. Bleys looked in the screen and saw yet another nondescript vehicle closely following them. Like the others, it was keeping up. The limousine must be holding its speed down to stay with them.
The main trafficway broadened; and there were few other travelers on it at this time of night—or morning. He looked at his wristpad. It was after four A.M. local time.
He looked again in the screen. They would be reaching the spaceport trafficway shortly—and very soon now Newton’s sun would be rising.
Chapter 34
A single musical note sounded from the speaker in the back section of the limousine. They slowed, out of the passing lane to the parking strip at the nearer edge of the trafficway, and came to a stop.
As they did, they approached another leaf-brown wheeled vehicle exactly like the one Bleys had seen join them earlier.
This conveyance was stopped well away from even the lane of least speed, and its body-shell had been lifted up and well clear of its motive unit above its frame and related working parts; so that altogether it reminded Bleys disagreeably of a cadaver in a morgue, half-dismembered by an unfinished autopsy.
Three men were standing around the power unit, staring down at it, talking and apparently, from time to time, doing things to it.
The driver of the limousine got out and strolled over to the other vehicle. He joined those standing there and they talked, peering in at the drive unit for a few moments.
Then one of the three who had been standing there turned and came to the limousine. It was Kaj Menowsky.
The limousine door across from Bleys was opened for him—evidently by the man who had been riding beside the driver. He stepped inside and took a floatseat, which he turned to face Bleys diagonally across the back space of the limousine.
Bleys looked back without a smile. Kaj did not seem in the least disturbed by the lack of a friendly welcome, if indeed he noticed it.
“How are you feeling now, Bleys Ahrens?” he asked.
“I feel the way I always feel. Fine,” said Bleys. It came to him he could hate this man with his eternal questions.
“Good,” Kaj said. “Keep as quiet as possible between now and when we get to the ship. It will make things easier both for you and for me if you’re disturbed as little as possible by whatever’s done around you.”
“I’ll do my best,” Bleys said, still unsmiling.
He looked away from Kaj as the front door of the limousine opened and the driver got back in. They lifted from the parking surface and pulled back into the traffic lane. There, they picked up speed rapidly, caught up with and began to pass the vehicles that had been traveling with them.
Kaj said no more. Soon they were back in the lead. As their driver lessened the vehicle’s speed and held his position, the phone in the back compartment sounded again, suddenly, this time with a brief snatch of melody, a series of notes that sounded as if they might have been from some ancient folk tune.
“Code.” Dahno looked at Bleys. “Nothing too hard to break, but they won’t have time enough to do anything like that before we’re in position. It’s Henry. He says he’s with Teams One and Two, and they got out of the city before the exit blocks were set up—”
He was interrupted by what sounded like a longer playing of the same or a similar melody.
“He says, barricade at the exit to the spaceport trafficway ahead,” announced Dahno. “But trafficway police, only—needle guns and stunning weapons. His two teams will make a diversion as soon as we’re in sight, then blow an opening in the barricade where it crosses the passing lane. All our vehicles to come through together, with this limo in the middle. Other vehicles on each side of it and in front and back as shields—”
He paused. Another burst of melody.
‘Try to get all vehicles thr
ough, but don’t stop for any disabled. Once through, our first six vehicles, not counting the limo, should peel off farther down the road and set up a line of defense for his two teams already in place beyond the barricade. There shouldn’t be a problem. We’ve got power weapons. All the police have are needle long-guns and hand weapons. Once pursuit’s stopped, the vehicles already through will join us; and we’ll head together for the next point of opposition.”
Dahno stopped talking. A few brief notes sounded.
“Next point should be the Da Vinci bridge. We can expect heavier weapons there.”
All their vehicles were close together now, on a long curve empty of other travelers. The dawn of Alpha Centauri B was not yet showing. The barricade was suddenly in sight, extra lighting making it starkly visible in one bright area.
Fifty years ago, it might have been no more than a double row of trafficway police cars. Now, even with the brief time at the disposal of the police, there was a chest-high, meter-thick barrier wall across the entire trafficway, bonded to the surface below it; and with a gap wide enough for only a single car to go through it in the center lane. The limousine was approaching that gap at two hundred kilometers an hour, and the other vehicles were running with it.
“Teams One and Two had better act in time,” Dahno said softly as the barrier wall rushed at them.
But just then the end of the wall at the single-vehicle opening exploded before them, and a space the width of four vehicles appeared.
Dahno chuckled harshly. “Henry must have a power cannon small enough for a couple of men to hand-carry—at least.”
“Yes,” Toni agreed.
In almost the same instant, two of the other magnetic-lift vehicles had speeded up and dodged in front of the limousine, while other vehicles of the group moved in solidly around the limousine, leaving it just barely room to steer. In what seemed like the same instant they were through the gap, there was a brief glimpse of vehicles and rubble beyond—and then they were headed up the open trafficway beyond, with what sounded like a storm of hail hitting on the windows and sides and even the roof of the limousine.
“Needles,” Dahno said unnecessarily.
“Yes,” Toni said evenly. “I think Bleys knows they won’t penetrate the body of this limousine.”
Bleys had not known. He was suddenly very aware of how little he knew about actual shooting outside of gallery practice, in spite of his younger years when some of the members of Henry’s church—the one that Bleys needed to attend with the rest of the family so as not to attract attention on worship-days—had gone out to be Soldiers of God. But his church itself had never been attacked seriously, except by youngsters with relatively harmless weapons; and the local church sergeant-at-arms, who had a power pistol, had only used it to scare them off.
Bleys felt a passing twinge of unusual and painful inferiority to Henry and all his men. But it was a brief sensation. The headache had become almost an old friend now, and a dullness in him seemed to suck up all his energy.
Now that the momentary excitement of passing the barricade was over, he was slipping back into what was almost an indifference. It was possibly the long night, almost without sleep, but Bleys had a feeling as if what was happening was taking place outside a transparent capsule in which he sat, apart from it all; no more connected with the action going on beyond the wall surrounding him than if what he saw and heard was only something projected for viewing.
The rain of needles diminished as they pulled away from the brightness of the barricade area. Gazing into the vision screen set in the bulkhead between their compartment and the control cabin, he saw it showing a view of what was behind their limousine, with the gap torn in the barricade receding rapidly. Close behind them, their own vehicles were following, with the wheeled cars coming last, lurching and bouncing as they passed over bits of rubble thrown widely by the explosion of the barrier where the bolts of a power weapon had hit it.
It was ridiculous, Bleys thought annoyedly, that a century had gone by with no one improving the range of the power weapons in atmosphere. Some small improvement to make better use of their tremendous destructive power. A power rifle would not need to have the amazing range of the needle guns, where every needle was effectively a miniature self-propelled missile that would keep going until its propulsive back end used up its fuel. But it would produce a remarkable difference if power guns could be made effective at more than a hundred meters or so from their target.
Four undamaged police cars, evidently most of those that were left workable, could be seen in the glow of the lighting from the blockaded area, setting out in pursuit—a brave, but probably useless action. They were all magnetic-lift vehicles, and their capacity for speed would undoubtedly be at least as great as that of the limousine—probably the fastest of the transportation in Bleys’s party—but they were making no real effort to close the gap between themselves and the last of those before them.
Fairly obviously, they were following only so that they could send messages ahead about the numbers and doings of the group that had just passed them.
As Bleys thought this, the power weapon that must have torn the hole in the barricade fired again, tearing up a wide strip across the trafficway behind the vehicles in Bleys’s group, but well ahead of the pursuing police.
The police pulled off to the side, stopped and got out, to simply stand and watch, as the steeply wooded slopes of the cliff beyond the turnoff began to disgorge more vehicles, as undoubtedly stolen as the limousine and those with it. These joined with those about the limousine. Soon they were all far enough off so that the cars and men behind them had dwindled to dots.
The road broadened and curved away before them again.
“How do you feel now, Bleys Ahrens?” Kaj asked. Bleys was aware of the medician’s fingers lightly holding his left wrist, the middle fingertips pressed against the blood vessel that was throbbing there with his pulse.
“That won’t do you any good.” Bleys glanced down at the hand holding him. “It takes more than something like that to speed up my pulse.”
Kaj let him go without comment.
“You didn’t answer my question, Bleys Ahrens,” he said. “How are you feeling now?”
“Just the way I felt the last time you asked me,” Bleys said.
“Good,” Kaj said. “If you do feel yourself getting tense, in particular, let me know—immediately. It’s a tricky business treating anyone who’s been dealt with the way you were; but I’ve got a short-acting chemical sedative here if you find tension or excitement beginning to run away with you. Try to avoid both.”
“I’ll do that.” Bleys turned to Toni and Dahno. “How far to this river crossing?” he asked—and realized instantly that he should have known that himself. He did have that earlier crossing in his mind’s eye now, but it was not very clear. It had been afternoon, then; now it was night—though now the sky was beginning to lighten. Alpha Centauri B was undoubtedly just below the horizon ahead of them, and a first paling of the sky showed where it would rise; while in the screen he could see that behind them the sky still held the color of night. Ahead of them, the stars were already fading and disappearing.
But the bridge… as he remembered, its two traffic surfaces—the upper one, outbound to the spaceport, and the inbound beneath it, to the city, had been so little different from the wide whiteness of an ordinary trafficway, that the fact they were crossing water could have passed unnoticed, except for the two towers at each end. It was a suspension bridge; but with modern materials, particularly single-molecule cables with their great tensile strength, the towers could be low and fairly inconspicuous.
As far as the river and its surroundings were concerned, what Bleys remembered was that the river had not been wide; though he seemed to remember it was deep and fast moving and ran under the bridge through a cleft with steep, heavily wooded sides, at right angles to the trafficway.
Leaving the bridge for the city, before, they had gone around a cur
ve like the one they had just taken. Before reaching the bridge on the way in from the spaceport, the way had curved in the opposite direction through another wooded cleft; for the river ran between two ridges, coming down from the mountain range now on Bleys’s left. So the bridge itself was still out of sight ahead and would be so until they were almost upon it.
On both sides the bridge approaches were short, flat stretches cut through the earth and rock at each of the bridge ends. But the slopes on either side of these stretches had been overgrown with bushes and trees; so that they seemed a natural part of the wooded reaches sloping down on each side of the river. The spaceport-bound trafficway crossed the bridge on a level above the trafficway toward the city.
“How soon do we get to the bridge?” Bleys asked again, for Dahno had not answered. All their vehicles were slowing, and the big man was busily watching the wooded incline now beginning to rise steeply on their right hand, as the slope on the left side was also beginning to do. Toni answered.
“Any moment now,” she said. “We’re just about there.”
In fact, just then, their limousine slowed almost to a walking pace, turned to the right edge of the paved surface and moved off it; on to the grassy verge and up the slope above, floating between the trees on its magnetic lift but dodging right and left to weave its way between the tree trunks.
Bleys saw the other air-lift and magnetic-lift vehicles following. He could not see whether any of the wheeled vehicles were attempting it, though the view behind them was artificially bright in the screen. A glance out the window to his own left, however, showed a forest still so deep in pre-dawn darkness that it was hard to see beyond the immediate vegetation.
Bleys gave up trying to see, either out the window or in the screen, and sat back in the chair. He was, he told himself, only a passenger.
The limousine, jinking right and left to find clearance to pass between the dark, gloomy pillars of variform pines, continued on up the steepening slope, until, after a few more minutes, it came out into a small clearing plainly made recently, for the fresh-colored stumps of cut trees, with the fallen trees themselves between them, were to be seen in the top-shaded emergency light set up in the middle of the clearing.