Deline came to see Arne and found him strapping a pack to his horse. She stared suspiciously. “Where are you going?”
“West,” he said. “To look for fugitives and find food supplies.”
“I will come with you. I am tired of this stupid war.”
“The trip west will be worse. Hard work, food where we find it—if we find it—lots of hiding from the Lantiff, and no fighting unless we have to.”
“Hiding!” She waved her arms disgustedly. “Aren’t we ever going to stand up to the Lantiff and fight? We kill some of them—from a distance. Then we withdraw, find a new hiding place, and wait until we can kill more of them—from a distance. Now we are about to withdraw again, but you are not even withdrawing—you are running. I knew all along you were a coward.”
Arne smiled patiently. “Hardly that. Cowards almost never run toward the enemy.”
“Are you coming back?”
“When I have finished what I am going west for, there will be plenty of work left to do here.”
“You would be invaluable to the Peer of Lant. With her huge armies to run, not to mention administering all the peerdoms she has conquered, she needs a first server. Before long, she will be the only peer who does. She needs a general, too. Look at the fumbling way her army attacks. You are going west?”
Arne nodded.
“So am I. West to find the Peer of Lant.”
“She will have you executed—if the Lantiff don’t kill you first.”
Deline tossed her head disdainfully. “The Lantiff wouldn’t dare lift a finger to me, and the peer is a warrior. So am I, and she will respect that. Will you come with me?”
Arne shook his head. “I’m fighting tyranny. I would choose death before I joined it.”
“Then I will go alone.”
As Arne took a step toward her, she sprang for her horse. Hutter had not yet dismounted. Deline reined up and turned to him.
“Hutter, I am going west—to give myself up to the Peer of Lant and fight for her if she will let me. Come with me or not, as you choose.” She rode off.
Hutter hesitated—but only for an instant. Then he raced after her. Neither of them looked back.
Bernal and his scouts were waiting nearby. Arne shouted a command, and they ran for their horses. They were off in a thunder of hoofs, but he knew they would be too late.
Inskor came later, listened, shook his head gravely. “She certainly would inspire the Lantiff to a greater effort in battle,” he said, “but that hardly matters now. There aren’t going to be any more battles—not here. Does she know the plan?”
“I think not. She had heard we were going to withdraw, but she thought it was only another adjustment of the defense line.”
“Then she doesn’t know anything that would hurt us. She knows where some of our troops are, but they will be gone before morning.” He paused. “Unless—does she know about Egarn?”
“No. She knows nothing about the ruins. She has never heard Egarn’s name. That is fortunate for us. If the Peer of Lant knew Egarn was there, she would call off all of her wars and set her armies to digging him out.”
“Does Hutter know anything?”
“No.”
“Maybe the scouts will catch them,” Inskor said.
But they didn’t. The army of Easlon withdrew that night, according to plan, and divided into two groups that went east and south. Arne, with his little troop of scouts and one-namers, went west.
17. ROSZT AND KAYNOR; EGARN
Everywhere Roszt and Kaynor went, they found themselves confronted by telephones. A motel pretending to any status at all had one of these contrivances in every room. From the beginning, they regarded them with deep suspicion. Their very shape defied logic; and though Egarn had explained telephones thoroughly, they hadn’t fully believed what he said. Certainly no telephone they encountered spoke to them, and for a long time they had no inclination whatsoever to speak to a telephone.
What Egarn said also seemed to imply that telephones were able to listen, which at first made them reticent about talking to each other in the presence of one.
Then they began to overhear people discussing all manner of things on public telephones, and eventually they discovered that one could ask anonymous questions by telephone and obtain information that otherwise would have required hours of investigation and kilometers of travel. The telephone became a valuable adjunct to their breaking and entering activities. All they had to do was telephone one of the Johnsons, pretend to have dialed a wrong number—something bafflingly easy to do—and thus find out whether anyone was at home in the house. Or one could telephone a business enterprise and discover, simply by asking, the times that it opened and closed.
This use of the telephone produced such excellent results that they became more venturesome. Factories intrigued them because they were so effectively sealed off from outsiders. A retail concern went out of its way to make strangers feel welcome. Factories, with tall fences topped with barbed-wire, guards on the gates to inspect the identification of anyone wanting to enter, and, remote behind vast parking lots, buildings whose functions were not only indiscernible but unimaginable, seemed specifically designed for a sinister object like making Honsun Lens.
One factory could have hundreds, even thousands, of employees. They knew from their research in city directories that many of them had employees named Johnson. They began to wonder whether all of them did.
Once the name of a factory was known—and usually it was painted on the building or displayed on a prominent sign—it was a simple matter to look up its telephone number in the directory. As an experiment, Kaynor called one and asked for Mr. Johnson. The switchboard operator handled the call cautiously; when Kaynor couldn’t identify the Johnson or the department he wanted, she transferred him to personnel. The personnel operator was less diplomatic.
“We’ve got five Johnsons,” she said exasperatedly. “Don’t you know which one you want?”
Kaynor preserved his anonymity by hanging up. After that, whenever he and Roszt chanced to pass that factory, they wondered again what was transpiring in those remote buildings, what roles the various Johnsons were performing, and whether any of them were on their lists.
They discovered an entirely new reference source in the student directory of the University of Rochester. This gave them an assortment of Johnsons who weren’t mentioned in the telephone directory or the city directory. It also introduced them to the university’s world of laboratories, classrooms, and dormitories. Several times they sauntered through its lovely campus along the Genesee River, but these incursions gained them nothing. Dormitories were even more risky than apartment buildings to prowl in, and they could make no sense at all of the multitude of things that seemed to be going on in the laboratories.
Before they had quite decided what to do about the university, they were befuddled by another discovery. Far to the south, but also on the bank of the Genesee River, was the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose directory doubtless would give them a new list of Johnsons if they could find a copy. Probably there were other such institutions. Each additional discovery complicated their task further.
They returned to the University of Rochester Campus, strolling along perplexedly and not knowing what they were looking for or whether they would recognize it if they found it, and quite by chance they overheard one student call to another, “I’ll meet you at Wilt Johnson’s restaurant.”
There was no Wilt Johnson on any of their lists. This mystery occupied them off and on for a tenite before they finally discovered Wilt’s Snack Shack, a little diner located in a run-down section of busy West Henrietta Avenue just south of Mt. Holly Cemetery. The place did look dismally like a shack on the outside. The interior was scrupulously clean, but there was a makeshift air about it. The lunch counter and the booths were of rough plywood; tables and chairs were rickety; nothing matched. The elaborate white hat the proprietor wore while he worked over the grill was the diner’s one ornate feature. Most of the patrons seemed to be students.