“Clothes and gear, that’s all,” said Hilary. “Weapons are getting too risky.”
“Can you take us close to her, at all?”
“Oh, I can get you fairly well in.” Hilary looked again at Hal. “Anything I’ll be able to give you in the way of clothes is going to fit pretty tight.”
“Let’s try what you’ve got,” said Jason.
Hilary led them to a partitioned-off corner of his dome. The door they went through let them into a storeroom piled to the ceiling with a jumble of containers and goods of all kinds. Hilary threaded his way among the stacks to a pile of what seemed to be mainly clothing and camping gear, and started pulling out items.
Twenty minutes later, he had them both outfitted with heavy bush clothing including both shoulder and belt packs and camping equipment. As Hilary had predicted, Hal’s shirt, jacket and undershirt were tight in the shoulders and short in the sleeves. Otherwise, everything that he had given Hal fitted well enough. The one particular blessing turned out to be the fact that there were bush boots available of the proper length for Hal’s feet. They were a little too wide, but extra socks and insoles took care of that.
“Now,” Hilary said when the outfitting was complete. “When did you eat last?”
Hunger returned to Hal’s consciousness like a body blow. Unconsciously, once it had become obvious in the cell that there was no hope of food soon, he had blocked out his need for it—strongly enough that he had even sat in the coffee place with Jason and not thought of food, when he could have had it for the ordering. As it was, Jason answered before he did.
“We didn’t. Not since we got off the ship.”
“Then I better feed you, hadn’t I?” grunted Hilary. He led them out of the storeroom and into another corner of the dome that had a cot, sink, foodkeeper and cooking equipment.
He fed them an enormous meal, mainly of fried vegetables, local mutton and bread, washed down with quantities of a flat, semi-sweet root beer, apparently made from a variform of the native Earth product. The heavy intake of food operated on Hal like a sedative. Once they had all piled into a battered six-place bush van, he stretched out and fell asleep.
He woke to a rhythmic sound that was the slashing of branch tips against the sides of the van. Looking out the windows on either side, he saw that they were proceeding down a forest track so narrow that the bushes on either side barely allowed the van to pass. Jason and Hilary were in mid-conversation in the front seat of the van.
“… Of course it won’t stop them!” Hilary was saying. “But if there’s anything at all the Belial-spawn are even a little sensitive to, it’s public opinion. If Rukh and her people can take care of the core shaft tap, it’ll be a choice for them of starving Hope, Valley-vale, and the other local cities, or shifting the ship outfitting to the core tap center on South Promise. It’ll save them trouble to shift. It’s a temporary spoke in their wheel, that’s all; but what more can we ask?”
“We can ask to win,” said Jason.
“God allowed the spawn to gain control in our cities,” said Hilary. “In His time, He will release us from them. Until then, our job is to testify for Him by doing all we can to resist them.”
Jason sighed.
“Hilary,” he said. “Sometimes I forget you’re just like the other old folk when it comes to anything that looks like an act of God’s will.”
“You haven’t lived long enough yet,” Hilary said. “To you, everything seems to turn on what’s happened in your own few years. Get older and look around the fourteen worlds, and you’ll see that the time of Judgement’s not that far off. Our race is old and sick in sin. On every world, things are falling into disorder and decay, and the coming among us of these mixed breeds who’d make everyone else into their personal cattle is only one more sign of the approach of Judgement.”
“I can’t take that attitude,” said Jason, shaking his head. “We wouldn’t be capable of hope, if hope had no meaning.”
“It’s got meaning,” said Hilary, “in a practical sense. Forcing the spawn to change their plans to another core tap delays them; and who’s to know but that very delay may be part of the battle plan of the Lord, as he girds his loins to fight this last and greatest fight?”
The noise of the branches hitting the sides and windows of the van ceased suddenly. They had emerged into an open area overgrown only by tall, straight-limbed conifers—variforms of some Earthly stock— spaced about upon uneven, rocky ground that had hardly any covering beyond patches of green moss and brown, dead needles fallen from the trees. The sun, for
the first time Hal had seen it since he had arrived on Harmony, was breaking through a high-lying mass of white and black clouds, wind-torn here and there to show occasional patches of startling blue and brilliant light. The ground-level breeze blew strongly against the van; and for the first time Hal became aware that their way was uphill. With that recognition, the realization came that the plant life and the terrain indicated a considerably higher altitude than that of Citadel.
Hal sat up on the seat.
“You alive back there?” said Hilary.
“Yes,” answered Hal.
“We’ll be there in a few minutes, Howard,” said Jason. “Let me talk to Rukh about you, first. It’ll be her decision as to whether you’re allowed to join her group, or not. If she won’t have you, I’ll come back with you, too; and we’ll stay together until Hilary can find a group that’ll have us both.”
“You’ll be on your own, if I have to take you back,” said Hilary. “I can’t afford to keep you around my place for fear of attracting attention.”
“We know that,” said Jason.
The van went up and over a rise of the terrain, and nosed down abruptly into a valley-like depression that was like a knife-cut in the slope. Some ten or twenty meters below was the bed of the valley, with a small stream running through it; the stream itself was hardly visible because of the thick cluster of small trees that grew about its moisture. The van slid down the slope of the valley wall on the air-cushion of its fans, plunged in among the trees, and came to a halt at a short distance from the near edge of the stream. From above, Hal had seen nothing of people or shelters, but suddenly they were in the midst of a small encampment.
He took it in at one glance. It was a picture that was to stay in his mind afterwards. Brightly touched by a moment of the sunlight breaking through the ragged clouds overhead, he saw a number of collapsible shelters like beehives the height of a grown man, their olive-colored side panels and tops further camouflaged by tree branches fastened about them. Two men were standing in the stream, apparently washing clothes. A woman approaching middle age, in a black, leather-like jacket, was just coming out of the trees to the left of the van. On a rock in the center of the clearing sat a gray-haired man with a cone rifle half torn down for cleaning its parts, lying on a cloth he had spread across his knees. Facing him, and turning now to face the van, was a tall, slim, dark young woman in a somber green bush jacket, its large number of square pockets bulging with their contents. Below the bush jacket, she wore heavy bush pants tucked into the tops of short boots. A gunbelt and sidearm were hooked tightly about her narrow waist, the black holster holding the sidearm with its weather flap clipped firmly down
She wore nothing on her head. Her black hair was cut short about her ears, and her face was narrow and perfect below a wide brow and brilliant, dark eyes. In that single, arrested moment, the repressed poet in Hal woke, and he thought that she was like the dark blade of a sword in the sunlight. Then his attention was jerked from her. In a series of flashing motions the disassembled parts of the cone rifle in the hands of the gray-haired man were thrown back together, ending with the hard slap of a new tube of cones into the magazine slot below the barrel. The man was almost as swift as Hal had seen Malachi be in similar demonstrations. The movements of this man did not have the smooth, unitary flow of Malachi’s—but he was almost
as fast.
“All right,” said the woman in the bush jacket. “It’s Hilary.”
The hands of the gray-haired man relaxed on the now-ready weapon; but the weapon itself still lay on the cloth over his knees, pointing in the general direction of Hal and the other two. Hilary got out of the van. Jason and Hal did the same.