The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Twenty-seven

From nearby in the shadowed woods, as he sat wrapped in a weather cloak on sentry duty on a cool, cloudless night, and some twenty meters from the winking coals of the burnt-down campfires and dark tents of the Command, Hal heard the sound of coughing. But he did not turn. It was Child, gone off a little from the camp into the night - no longer to hide his now-frequent discomfort, but to find a small amount of privacy in which to live with it.

Under the stupidity of his own numbing accumulation of fatigue, Hal's mind was working - slowly, but effectively. He was employing an Exotic technique in which he had been drilled by Walter. In essence, it was like reading a printed page with a magnifying glass that gave him one letter at a time. Plainly, some kind of decision had to be made. Unable to catch them, Barbage and his unlimitedly available Militia forces had settled for harrying them into the kind of exhaustion that would make their eventual capture certain.

Rukh's trick with the donkeys had won them enough of an initial lead on Barbage and the Militia from the second district, so that the Command had been able to get safely over the border into the third district; and there, luck, or an uncooperative local Militia official, had stretched that lead into enough of an edge so that they had been able to get clear of that district and into a fourth one. By that time they were into a different type of countryside; one that worked to their advantage more than it did to that of their pursuers.

Here, the foothills had spread out and become an open, rolling territory of sandy and stony soil replacing the flat, rich farmland they had left behind them. They were no longer penned closely between the lowlands and the mountains; the mountains were far off, blue on the horizon, and the lowlands were lost beyond the opposite horizon, even further.

In this different land of scrub trees, bushes, and narrow streams, was their eventual goal, the city of Ahruma itself, which enclosed the power plant built over the Core Tap they planned to sabotage. There were farms in this territory, too, but they were poor ones, scattered, small, and served with a meager network of roads. For Militia, it was bad country in which to mount a pursuit; but for a Command, it was even worse country in which to survive. As Rukh had said, without their donkey-loads of potential explosive, the Command could have dispersed and effectively ceased to be. But as long as they held tenaciously to the fertilizer and the gunpowder - and therefore necessarily to the donkeys themselves - they could not lose the troops that followed them.

For that reason, they dared not move into Ahruma as planned and contact local sympathizers there for help and to begin mounting their attack on the power plant. The end result of this situation had been that they were continuing to wander the dry hill country around the city at a distance far enough off not to arouse Militia suspicions as to their true destination.

They had stripped the Command to its essentials - those beasts and people without whom the mission could not be accomplished. Now the attrition of being hounded day and night was beginning to wear down both those on two legs and on four. In the end, if this kept up, Barbage would run them into an exhaustion in which they would be forced to stand and fight; and which would give him an easy victory.

The military answer, Hal's early lessons told him, was to attack the Militia camp at night with a small number of the Command; who would then throw their lives away, but do enough damage to render the troops incapable of further pursuit until they could acquire replacements of men and equipment - buying at least twenty-four hours. In that space of time the rest of the Command could force-march to the outskirts of Ahruma and lose themselves, with what their donkeys carried, in the city with their sympathizers.

But the military answer was one that could coldly calculate a certain percentage of an available force as expendable for the purchase of a tactical advantage to the force as a whole. This was unacceptable, in the case of the Command, whose people were as close as members of the same family; and where the Captain would never order such an action.

So the question of what to do came back to turn upon his own actions. Both Barbage and Rukh were trapped in a situation where they could do little but wait for it to wear down. He, on the other hand, should be able to act. And should if he could. But until now, fogged by the arrears of tiredness, his mind had failed to come up with a workable plan.

The sound of coughing had ceased. A few moments later, his ears caught the faint sounds of Child making his way back to his tent. Hal got to his feet. As a sub-officer, he was supposed to be exempt from sentry, kitchen, and other ordinary duties so that he could keep himself ready and alert to his higher responsibilities. But in actual practice, like most of the Command's other sub-officers, he ended up a good share of the time filling in under emergency conditions for one or the other of the members of his own group. Just now he had taken over the sentry duty of one of the team he had inherited from Morelly, who had begun out of excess of exhaustion to nod off on post. But now the man he had relieved had had an extra two hours of sleep; and it was time to return him to his obligations. Hal got to his feet and went into the camp.

He pushed through the flap of a tent and shook the slumbering man.

"Moh," he said, speaking softly, so as not to wake the three other sleepers in the tent, into the ear visible above the edge of the sleeping sack, "time to go back on duty."

The sleeper grunted, stirred, opened his eyes and began wearily to climb out of his bedsack. Hal stayed with him until he was armed and on post, then went to check on the other two sentries posted about the camp.

The others, both women, were awake and reporting all quiet. The Militia camp was only an estimated twelve kilometers from them; and while a nighttime attack by the clumsier, city-trained enemy was possible, it was unlikely. Still, it paid not to take chances. On impulse, Hal went back into the camp, found the tent where Child slept alone, and let himself through the flap.

He squatted beside the Command's now slumbering Lieutenant. For a moment he watched the face, aged a dozen years or more by the exhaustion of the last week, further deepened into a mask of wrinkles and bones by its relaxation into unconsciousness.

"Child-of-God…" he said softly.

He had barely breathed the words. But instantly the other was awake and looking up at him, and Hal knew that inside the sack, one bony hand had closed around the butt of a power pistol with a sawed-off barrel, pointing it through the cloth at whoever had roused him.

"Howard?" said Child, equally low-voiced although there was no one at hand to disturb.

"It's close to the end of my watch," Hal said. "I'd like to make a quick run, by myself, to the Militia camp - just to see how tired they look; and, with luck, I might pick up one of their maps of this area. We could do with the chance to check our own maps against theirs. Also, with real luck, I could get a map marked with their rendezvous and supply spots."

Child lay still for a few seconds more.

"Very well," he said. "As soon as thou art off watch, thou canst go."

"That's the thing," Hal said. "I'd like to leave now, to make as much use as possible of the darkness that's left. I could wake Falt early, and I don't think he'd object to going on watch an hour or so before his time."

Child lay still again for several seconds.

"Very well," he said, "provided Falt agrees. If he hath objection, come back to me."

"I will," said Hal.

He got up and went out. Closing the tent flap behind him, he heard Child, awake once more to the irritation in his lungs, cough briefly.

Falt did not, as Hal had known he would not, object. Hal got his cone rifle and a small travelling pack to supplement his sidearm and knife, blackened his hands and face and left. An hour and eighteen minutes later he was crouching down in the darkness on the bank of a creek behind a stand of young variform willows, having crept up to almost within arm's-length of a pair of young Militiamen. The pair was apparently on watch by a fire at one end of the camp - a watch that presumably took the place of the sentries he had never known the Militia forces to put out.

"… soon," one of these was saying as Hal eased into position. They were both about middle height for Harmonyites, black-haired and fresh-faced - no more than in their late teens. "And I'll be glad to get back. I hath little stomach for this sort of plowing through the woods all the time."

"Thou hath, hath thou?" The jeer in the voice of the other was obvious. "It's I have little stomach, brickhead! You'll never make a prophet, old or young."

"You won't, either! Anyway, I'm one of the Elect. You aren't!"

"Who says I'm not? And who told you you were?"

"My folks - "

"Are we on watch?" Barbage was suddenly on the other side of the fire, shoulders a little hunched, eyes like polished obsidian chips in their reflection of the firelight. "Or are we playing the games that childhood hath still left in us?"

The two were silent, staring at him.

"Answer me!"

"Games," muttered the two, low-voiced.

"And why should we not play games when we are on watch?"

But Hal did not wait to hear the answers of the two as Barbage continued to catechize them. He moved backward, got to his feet, and slipped around the perimeter of the encampment until he was level with the tents of the officers, just a short distance from the fire and easily recognizable by their better cloth and greater size.

There were six of them. Hal slid out of the darkness of the surrounding undergrowth to the back wall of the first in line. With the razor tip of his knife, soundlessly, he made a small slit in the fabric and spread the slit enough to look within. It took a moment for his vision to adjust to the greater darkness within, but when it did he saw a camp chair, a table, and a cot - unoccupied. As the one in effective command of the expedition, Barbage had - as Hal had suspected - taken the first tent in the officer's row.

Hal crept quietly around the side of the tent and looked toward the fire. The rest of the camp slumbered. Barbage, standing, still had his back to his own quarters; and the two he was verbally trouncing would be blinded by the close firelight to something as far away as this tent row, even if all their attention had not been frozen on Barbage.

Softly and swiftly, Hal turned the corner of the tent, lifted its flap, and let himself inside.

He had no time to examine the interior in detail. There was a map in the viewer lying among papers on the table; but to take it would make too obvious his visit. Hal looked about and found what he expected, a map case at the foot of the bed. Opening it, he came up with a full rack of slides for the viewer. Hastily, he took them all to the table, took out the slide already in the viewer and began to check the other slides out in it, one by one.

He found one of the territory roughly three days march ahead, took it out and replaced it with the original slide, and put the other slides back in the mapcase. Outside the voice of Barbage ceased speaking. Hal stepped to the tent flap and peered out, his fingers lightly grasping the knife hilt.

But Barbage was still standing, silently staring at the two by the fire. A moment later he began to speak to them again; and in a second Hal was into the woods. Another minute put him safely beyond earshot of the voice; and five minutes later he was well on his way back to the Command.

When he returned, daylight was still a full hour off; and Child, when Hal looked into the Lieutenant's tent, was sleeping heavily. Hal went back to his own tent and found his own map viewer. Sitting cross-legged in the darkness while Jason slept undisturbed behind him, he put the stolen slide into it.

The small interior illuminant of the viewer, triggered to life by his finger pressure on its control, made the map leap into white, illuminated relief before him. It showed a stretch of rises and hollows of land, covered with scrub vegetation identical with the area they were now in. To the bottom of its display, a road ran almost horizontally across the map, to intersect with a crossroad near the lower right corner. Marked along the road were three asterisks, with code marks next to them.

The code marks were undecipherable, but a good guess could be made at what they represented. They would give details of the number of trucks and personnel who would be delivering supplies to the points the asterisks marked. It was the delivery of such supplies that allowed the Militia to travel light; and made up for the fact that the Militiamen themselves were, from lack of experience, slow and clumsy compared to the members of the Command. Also, the frequent contact with vehicles at the delivery points allowed for speedy evacuation of sick or hurt men; or any who might, for one reason or another, slow down the pursuit.

Hal mentally photographed the map, took it from the viewer and put it in his pocket. He went to find Falt and pay back the extra hour of watch the other had taken for him.

"You go get some sleep while you can!" Falt said. "James and Rukh are bad enough without you trying to imitate them and sleep less than half an hour out of the day and night together. I'm fine."

"All right," said Hal. He was suddenly unutterably conscious of his own weariness, and of a sort of light-headedness at the same time. "Thanks."

"Just get some sleep," said Falt.

"If you'll wake me as soon as Rukh gets up."

"Oh? All right, then."

Hal went back to his own tent. Crawling into his bedsack, with nothing but his boots and harness removed and his pockets emptied, he lay back in the dark, staring at the darkness under the tent roof, with one forearm flung up across his eyes. He realized suddenly that his forehead felt hot; and anger erupted in him. A number of the Command besides Child were beginning to show signs of minor infections as the unrelieved exhaustion exacted its price; but he had assumed that he, of all of them, should be immune to any such thing. He pushed the emotion aside as unprofitable. It was true he had been on his feet, with only brief naps, for several days now…

He woke suddenly to the awareness that he had been asleep, and that Falt, standing back, was shaking his left foot within the bedsack, to wake him. He blinked into full awareness.

"Have I been jumping on people who wake me?" he asked.

"Not jumping - but you do come awake as if you meant to hit first and open your eyes after," said Falt. "You'll find Rukh by the kitchen setup."

"Right," said Hal, pulling himself out of his bedsack and reaching for the contents of his pocket where he had laid them out earlier. He checked suddenly and looked back up at Falt. "At the kitchen? How long has she been up? A couple of hours? I asked you - "

Falt snorted, turned and went out.

Hal finished redressing and went out himself. Rukh, as Falt had said, was down where the kitchen had been set up on making camp the night before, standing, plate and fork in hand, to finish her early meal. She looked up at Hal as he approached.

"I made a short visit to the Militia camp early this morning - " he began.

"I know," she said, scraping her plate clean and handing it, with the fork, back to Tallah. "James told me he gave you permission. In the future, I'd like you to be a little more specific about why you want to make such a reconnaissance. I've told James to ask you for it."

"I wasn't too sure what I could find out," he said. "As it happened, I was lucky…"

He told her about Barbage and the two young Militiamen on watch.

"So I took advantage of the chance to go right into his tent," he said. "It's what I suspected. Barbage's not like the others. He's serious military. His tent shows it. Anyway, I got one of the maps from his case."

He handed her his viewer with the map already in it.

She put it to her eye and pressed the button for the illuminant. For a long moment she stood studying it without saying a word. Then she lowered the viewer, took out the map slide and handed the viewer back to him, putting the map in her pocket.

"It looks like the country up ahead of us," she said.

He nodded.

"It was in order with the other maps in his map case - I estimated three days march ahead."

"What good did you think it would do us to have this?"

"For one thing," he said, "it lets us check our own maps against it. No offense to the local people you got ours from, but what we have's a lot more sketchy and less accurate than this which has to be from breakdowns of regular survey information."

"All right," she said. "But we might have lost you; and you've become valuable to us, Howard. I'm not sure it was worth the risk."

"I thought," he said slowly, "we might consider hijacking some of those supplies they're sending him."

Her dark eyes were hard on him.

"It could cost us six to ten people, attacking one of those supply points. Do you think they send out trucks like that without adequate troops and weapons to protect it?"

"I didn't mean at the supply point," he said. "I thought we could take just a single truck, someplace along the route, since we know ahead of time where they'll be headed for."

She was silent.

"We can easily figure out the route a truck'll have to take to the supply point. The old hands in the Command tell me they don't generally send them out in group convoy, but one at a time."

"That's true," she said, thoughtfully. "Normally, they don't worry about a pursued Command having the time to get down to the roads. Also, it's easier to send out each filled truck as it's ready, than to struggle with a convoy of half a dozen to be unloaded all at once and brought back together."

"If you want…" He closed in on her first expression of interest quickly, "I can figure out the details of taking one of them, and you or Child could decide from there. Almost anything they'd be carrying would be something we'd need."

She looked at him soberly.

"How much rest have you had lately?" she asked.

"As much as anyone else."

"Which anyone else? James?"

"Or you," he said, bluntly.

"I'm Captain of this Command, and James is First Officer. Tonight," she said, "you're to be off any duty you're scheduled for. Tonight, you sleep. The next day, if you've slept through, bring me a plan for taking one of the trucks."

"We'll be only one day away from that map by tomorrow," he said.

"There're three supply points marked on it, each one at least a day apart. You're not going to lack time to plan."

There was no reasonable argument against that. He nodded; and was turning away to get something to eat himself, when his mind exploded suddenly with the understanding that had been gnawing its way out of his unconscious into his conscious from the moment in which he had first glimpsed the slide in Barbage's tent.

"Rukh!" He swung back to her. Her eyes stared questioningly at his face. "I knew there was something wrong! We've got to change route, right away!"

"What is it?" She had tensed, reflecting his tension.

"That slide. I knew something was bothering me about it. You said it yourself just now! It shows supply points for the next three to six days. Why would Barbage have arranged deliveries of supplies up to six days ahead along the road we just happen to be paralleling now? He knows we never move in the same line for more than two days at a time. Six days from now we'd be anywhere but close to that road, and his troops are right behind us!"

He saw understanding register on her. She swung about.

"Tallan!" she snapped. "Go find James. Pass the word to get moving under any conditions at all. The Militia've sent units into the woods ahead of us to catch us between them and the troops that're after us."