Hal paused. "Actually, you know," he said in a lower, more confidential tone in Harvey's ear, "those two just wanted an excuse to have their fun with what they had left." "Right. They would," muttered Harvey. "Now, the first thing," Hal went on, "is to get a couple of the soldiers you can trust to remember what you say and do what you want. Get them in here with you to see what's happened, and then they can take the big man out and bury him. Also, you better record some pictures of how things were, here, while you're at it, to show back at headquarters." "Now!" he said, clapping his hands softly together behind Harvey's right ear. "Remember. None of you've seen anyone but the big man and the girl. Now, get things moving!"
Harvey started, turned, and went out of the hutment. Hal followed. The fat man walked slowly back to the seated soldiers, an went around to stand in front of them. " All right, listen to me now... " he began... and paused. Hal whispered in his ear and he spoke up again. "We've had a blowup. Both the Force and the Group are dead. That leaves me in command, so all of you snap to and do what I tell you! We've got to bury that prisoner, strike camp, and get the officers' bodies back to headquarters, right away. Ranj, Wilson and Morui, you three come with me. Bring a recorder. I want you for witnesses and to make some recordings of what's happened inside the Force's hutment. The rest of you get busy striking camp and making ready to move out. Come on, come on now! Move!"
Time was also moving, Hal noted. Dawn was very close. Both moons were long down, and the utter blackness just before day, at the ground level, denied the lightening of the sky beyond the lamps of the camp, when he looked straight up.
Back on the ledge, Hal had warned the Guild people to start getting back out of sight the moment he first clapped his hands, to begin the process of bringing the soldiers partially out of their hypnosis. They had faithfully faded back beyond the lights into the jungle dark, and, as the morning lightened further, they would move farther and farther off, until even under daylight, the forest itself would hide them from the view of anyone in the camp.
In the meantime Hal, continuing to remind the three soldiers Harvey had chosen and any others he dealt with, that he was not there as far as their perceptions were concerned, had supervised the picture-taking of the interior of Liu's hutment. Then, at his prompting, Harvey had picked up entrenching tools and taken the same men out into the darkness with a single handlight, to dig a grave for the supposedly dead Artur. While they were involved in this task, he had the Guild bearers carry Artur, once more on the stretcher, with the straps securing him in place, to the edge of the excavation. The soldiers, digging and swearing at the hand labor, paid no attention to the bringers of the body they were to dispose of, and, having set Artur down, the Guild people melted back out of sight into the darkness.
Harvey had been supervising the grave-digging under Hal's instructions. When the diggers had gone deep enough into the soft forest floor, half mold, half earth, Hal had Harvey call them out for a break in their labors and take them aside. There, by the limited light of the single source of illumination they had brought with them, he brought them momentarily back into a more profound state of hypnosis, and gave them a false memory of having tumbled Artur themselves from the graveside into the grave, then begun to cover him up, before Harvey had called them out for a rest. Then he signaled the stretcher bearers to start back to the ledge with Artur.
As soon as they had faded into the darkness with their load, at Hal's prompting, Harvey sent the grave-diggers back to finish shoveling into the open excavation all that they had taken out. They did so, and Harvey took them back to camp. By now, all of the hutments and erected lights were down and packed, ready to move, and most of the soldiers themselves were in full kit, with their weapons, and ready to move out as well -
At the edge of the camp, Hal left the soldiery to complete the job of returning to their headquarters under Harvey's command -
He had little doubt that from this point on, military habit would take them back there without further prompting. The hypnotic command he had given them would eventually wear off, but their memories of what had actually happened would remain confused, and there would be nothing for any of them to gain later by changing their version of what had happened, as they would have originally given it to their superiors.
He dropped into a lope over the now clearly visible ground, to catch up with the party from the Guild, who by this time would be halfway back to the entrance of the trail up the mountainside.
The day was rapidly brightening around him and his steady jog felt good. The ledge was small enough, and he had been deeply enough immersed in his other concerns, so that he had not deliberately walked, let alone covered ground at a run except for that one day, since he had left his exercise room at the Final Encyclopedia.
He was reminded again of what he had thought during that last run, a few days ago - even his running treadmill at the Final Encyclopedia, surrounded with the images and scents of an imaginary outdoors, had not been like this. This was real, and it brought back old memories of his runs through the forest near the estate in the Rocky Mountains where he had spent his second childhood, before the coming of the Others had sent him scuttling for a hiding place on the Younger Worlds.
For a moment, the image of the young gunmen with their long, slim-barreled void pistols, and Bleys Ahrens, as they had suddenly appeared at the estate, came back to him. Particularly Bleys, slimmer then than he was now - wherever on the Younger Worlds he might be at this moment, eleven years later. Slimmer, and seeming much taller, both because then, in that first sight, Hal had not himself reached his full adult height, which was to be the equal of Bleys', and because of the last ten years of slight but noticeable aging and thickening of the other man's body.
A cold feeling like a breath of some stray breeze seemed to pass through him. He had let Amanda bring him here to Kultis and the Chantry Guild with no real faith that here he might be helped to find the Creative Universe. The impasse keeping him from that goal these last two years had been like some great, impossibly wide, impossibly thick wall of glass, holding him out. But now, over the past few weeks, he had come out of the despondency that his failure had built in him. Hope had stirred in him once again - but with hope, now, also came fear.
Time was passing. Tam's days were numbered. Even if they had not been, the force that Bleys was building to overwhelm even the phase-shielded Earth was moving to its inevitable completion. Time was on the march, and while he had refound hope - great hope, somehow, with this successful rescue of Artur - he had still not found a way past that impassable, glasslike barrier to his lifetime goal-
He glimpsed the figures of some of the Guild members through the farther trees before him and realized he had finally caught up with them. He checked his jog to a walk. It might worry them to see him running, might make them think that there was more urgency than there actually was now, to getting Artur up the mountainside to the ledge and proper care. Actually, it was only Artur's physical condition that still urged that time not be wasted. The soldiers of the Occupation Forces should not bother them for some little time to come.
He walked, but stretched his stride to cover ground swiftly without appearing to race. In a moment or two he was up with them. Artur, on the stretcher, was at the head of the traveling group, with a man on each of the four handles of the stretcher. As Hal had foreseen, Artur was proving a heavy load for his carriers, even across this level, if somewhat cluttered, forest floor. The extra people beyond the rock would be very much needed to get him safety up the steep trail of the mountainside to the ledge. "How is he?" Hal asked Onete, who was walking beside the head of the stretcher, keeping an eye on Artur's face. "He came to," answered Onete, without taking her eyes off Artur's face. "Tannaheh gave me several loaded syringes to use if he did that. I used one, and he went back to sleep. I wish Tannaheh had told me what I was supposed to be giving him. I don't like doing things like that without knowing." "It probably didn't occur to Tannaheh," said Hal. "It occurred to me," Onete said, "but he shoved them into my hand just as we left the ledge, after running after us to give them to me. I didn't have a chance to ask him, in the dark and all. Anyway, Artur's back unconscious or sleeping again, one of the two, and that's a blessing-"