"How do you want to make the trip to Omalu?" she asked.
He swallowed some bread.
"Is there a choice?"
"There's two ways," she told him. "We can hitch a ride, if someone from the area happens to be flying into Omalu today; or, if no one is, which is most likely, we can call for transportation for you from Omalu. In either case, you'll have to pay your way to whoever we ride with. I won't. Of course, I can take you. Because of the work I do, I've got my own jitney."
He frowned. What she had just said had somehow seemed to end hanging in the air.
"In which case I wouldn't have to pay," he said, slowly. "But the Dorsai can use any interstellar credits it can get from me, isn't that right?"
"That's right," she said. "If you can afford them."
"Of course," he said. "Just let me know how much I ought to pay you for the ride."
"We'll go by the fuel used," she got to her feet. "I'll go roll the jitney out now. You finish here and collect anything you've got to take with you. Then come down beyond the stable and you'll find me."
There was nothing that he particularly needed to bring beyond what he had carried in when he had come. What he was carrying away that was important, from the Dorsai and particularly from Fal Morgan and Foralie, was immaterial and interior. They lifted off into the same almost-cloudless sky that had graced all the days he had been there.
- And they descended into an unbroken layer of clouds a little more than an hour later, over Omalu.
Below the clouds it was raining; not heavily, but steadily. They landed on the planetary pad, on the other side of the terminal from the pad for deep-space ships; and ran together through the rain to the side door of the terminal.
When they got to the restaurant on the building's second level, the list of the reservation screen showed the Grey Captains in Cubicle Four. Amanda led Hal through the open central dining area to the private rooms beyond. Cubicle Four turned out to be a room more than adequate to hold the nearly forty people already seated at square, green tables, there. Three sides of the room were white-dyed, concrete walls, with the fourth side all window, giving on the downpour over the planetary pad. Heavy white coffee cups were scattered around a number of the tables.
"You've got nearly two hours," said Amanda. "Come along. There's at least a dozen people here you haven't met yet."
She took him off to be introduced. It developed that two of those who had walked out the day before, one woman and one man, had returned, and with them were Grey Captains who had not chosen, or had not been able, to make the first meeting. After Hal had been introduced he took a chair facing a semi-circle of others drawn from the tables and began to answer questions. After a little more than an hour however, he called a halt.
"I don't think we're making much progress this way," he told them. "Basically what you're all asking me for are specific answers. This is the very thing I don't have to give you, simply because I haven't got them myself yet. I don't have a specific plan, as I've already told you, several times. That's what I'm going to the Final Encyclopedia to work out. All I can do for you now is what I've done; point out the situation and leave you to look at it for yourselves until I've got more information."
"No offense intended, Hal Mayne," said Rourke di Facino. He was sitting in the center of the semicircle, looking small and dandified, with the large, padded collar of his travelling jacket thrown open to the warmth of the cubicle. "But you've raised a demon among us; and now you seem to be refusing to lend a hand in laying it."
For a moment it seemed to Hal that the certainty that had visited him in the dining room stirred and threatened to take him over again. Then it subsided; and he kept a firm grip on his patience.
"I'll repeat what I've said before," he said. "I've only pointed out to you the situation as it exists; and that was something you actually already knew. You've all made it plain that you won't promise to do anything more than consider what I've told you. On my side, I can't promise anything more than I have, either."
"At least," said Ke Gok, "give us some idea of what to expect, some idea of what direction you're heading in. Give us something we can tie to."
"All right," said Hal. "Let me put it this way, then. Would you all be willing to move against the Others if the chance could be offered in the form of ordinary military action?"
There was a general chorus of assent.
"All right," said Hal, wearily. "As far as I know now, that's what I'll be trying to find for you. It's your strength; and it's only sensible to work with it."
"And on that note," said Amanda, getting to her feet, "I'm going to take Hal Mayne away. He'll be going directly to his ship. Those of you who want to say goodbye, say it now."
To Hal's surprise, they all crowded around him. It was not until Amanda had finally extricated him and they were going down a flight of old-fashioned stairs to the ground level, that he thought to look at his chronometer.
"We've got a good ten minutes yet before I'd have had to go," he said.
"I wanted to talk to you alone," said Amanda. "Here, this way."
She led him off from the foot of the stairs to a small waiting room with a door in its far wall. She led him to the door, opened it and they stepped out onto the spaceship pad.
The door sucked shut behind them under the differential in air pressure between pad and terminal. Weather control had been turned on over the pad, now that liftoff was close. The clouds lay thick above, appearing to be humped up into a dome over the pad by the action of the control; and gray, wavering curtains of rain enclosed the three open sides of the pad. Out here, the air felt damp and thick, with that peculiar stillness found in atmosphere artificially held. The increased pressure and the stillness, together, gave the impression that they were suspended in a bubble outside of ordinary time and space. Eighty meters distant, out on the pad, the spaceship for Freiland lay, lengthwise, enormous and mirror-bright, with her polished skin holding the images of the terminal, the clouds and the rain about her, fuming off the last of the decontaminant gas from her loaded cargo holds.
Amanda turned and began to walk eastward along the blank lower face of the terminal, pierced only by glassless, self-sealing doors like the one that had let them onto the pad. Hal fell in beside her.
"You realize," she said, "you're only been here eight days." She was walking along with her eyes fixed on the rain curtain at the pad edge, two hundred meters ahead of them.
"Yes," he said. "It hasn't been long."
"It's not easy to get to understand someone else in eight days - or eight weeks or eight months, for that matter," she said. She glanced sideways at him, briefly; then turned her attention once more to the rain at the edge of the pad. "If two people come from different cultures, they can use the same words and mean two different things; and if their reasons for doing what they do aren't understood, then without planning to, either one of them can completely mislead the other."
"Yes," he said. "I know."
"I know you were raised by a Dorsai," she said. "But that's not the same as being born here. Even born here, you could be wrong about someone from another household. You don't know - and in eight days you couldn't learn to know - the Morgans. Or the Amandas. Or me."
"It's all right," he said. "I think I know what you're trying to tell me. I understand. I simply look like Ian."
She stopped, turned and stared at him. Necessarily, he also stopped, and they stood, face to face.
"Ian?" she said.
"That's what I found out last night, wasn't it?" he said. "That he looked in his old age something like me; and you'd been… fond of him."
"Oh!" she said, and looked away from him, back at the rain. "Not that, too!"