Around the table they were regarding him oddly.
"I'm afraid," said Hal slowly, "I'd have trouble explaining it to your satisfaction. Basically, it's just that I'll have to see these places and the people working in them for myself. I'll be looking for things your people could never give me. You'll just have to take my word for it, that it's necessary I go and see for myself."
The concept of the Final Encyclopedia had been forming like a palpable mass in his mind as he spoke and the sense of the immeasurably vast, inchoate problem with which he had been wrestling these last years crouched like a living thing before him. There was no way of explaining to Exotics that the battleground he now envisioned encroached literally upon that territory which encompassed the human soul.
"You'll simply have to trust me," he repeated, "when I say it's necessary."
"Well," said Padma heavily, "if you must… we still have courier ships making the trips back and forth between these two worlds of ours and our embassies on the other worlds. We can supply you with a ship."
Hal breathed out evenly and lowered his gaze to the polished pool of darkness that was the tabletop.
"A ship won't be necessary," he heard himself say, as if from some distance. "The Dorsai've already given me one - and a driver."
He continued to stare into the darkness of the tabletop for a moment longer, then slowly raised his eyes and looked back once more at Amid. He smiled again, but this time the smile faded quickly.
"It seems that trip of mine to Old Earth is going to have to wait a little longer, after all," he said.
His perception was correct. Nearly four months later, standard time, he had still not stepped within the orbit of Earth; and he was running for his life through back alleys of Novenoe, a city on Freiland.
The months of visiting most of the Younger Worlds, slipping in with his Dorsai courier ship and going secretly to make first-hand observations at the factories and installations in which the Others were putting together the soldiers and material they would use in their war effort, had worn him thin - almost as thin as he had been on Harmony when the Militia had caught him.
But this was a different thinness. With his admission at last to Amanda of his first identity as Donal Graeme - that identity that had been withheld from him deliberately by his Donal-self until he should pass through the learning process of growing up as Hal Mayne - he had finally come very close to replicating Donal's old physical abilities and strengths, though he still necessarily fell short of the strength and skill of an adult Dorsai who had maintained his training daily since birth. Still, what he had accomplished flew in the face of all physiological experience among the Dorsai. That after twenty-odd years of living untrained by Dorsai standards (even giving him credit for what Malachi Nasuno had taught him up into his sixteenth year) it was simply beyond reason that in only a few months he had been able to achieve reflexes and responses that came at all close to being as effective as Simon Graeme's, for example.
Simon himself had commented on it. It had been impossible to hide the development in Hal from the other man, under the conditions of the close-knit existence they shared aboard the courier vessel with Amid. The old Exotic had been riding with them as a necessary living passport for Hal to the Exotic embassies from which they drew information and assistance. That development was, as Simon hinted, at once impossible and an obvious fact, and Simon had compared the achievement with that of some of the martial artists down through history who had become legendary in their own times. Beyond that comment, the current titular head of the Graeme family seemed content to leave the matter for later explanation. Hal had no choice but to do the same; although to him, too, it was a cause for wonder and a puzzle not as easy to accept as it seemed to be for Simon.
His own temporary conclusion was that it could be some sort of psychic force at work upon him in response to Donal's emergent identity; a psychic force that could shape even bone and muscle, if necessary. Cletus Grahame, nearly two hundred years before, had been supposed to have rebuilt a damaged knee of his by some such means. At the same time, something in Hal strongly insisted that there was more to it than the simple term "psychic force" implied; and the unknown element nagged at him.
But there had been no time to ponder this currently; and there was certainly none at this present moment. Running easily but steadily, like a hunger-gaunted wolf dodging through the dark and odiferous passages that hardly deserved the names of streets and alleys in this quarter of ruined buildings, Hal felt the intuition that had been Donal's numbering and placing in position about him the pursuers that were now closing in.
He had gotten inside the spaceship yards he had gone to Freiland to see; and identified the vessels being built there as military transports. But after these many months the forces controlled by the Others on all their worlds were alerted and on watch for him; and he had been both identified and pursued by the so-called "executive" arm of the Novenoe police. His only hope of escape from them lay in the courier ship waiting for him in the yard of a decayed warehouse. He was leading his pursuers toward it now, simply because he had no other choice. The invisible calculations of intuitive logic that had woken in him from the Donal part of himself told him there was no way he could reach the vessel before those hunting him would close in on him.
His estimate was that there were between thirty and forty of the "executives" - and they would know this part of Novenoe better than he did.
He ran on - steadily, still at three-quarter speed, saving his strength for the moment in which he would need it. The last leg of his journey led over broken, but still high, security fences; and across forgotten yards full of abandoned equipment rusting in the darkness. As, still running, he reached the last fence but two, flung up a hand to catch its top edge and vaulted over, he heard ahead of him the small, impatient sounds of at least two police in wait for him in the darkness of the littered yard.
He crouched down and went like a ghost, feeling his way ahead and around the debris, large and small, that littered his way. His aim was to bypass those in wait for him if he could; but one of them - evidently cramped and weary with waiting - rose and blundered directly into his way as Hal tried to pass.
Hal felt the heat of the body approaching and both smelled and heard the other's breath. There was no time to go around, so he rose from the ground and struck out, swiftly.
The "executive" dropped, but grunted as he fell; and immediately a thin, rapier-like guide-beam of visible light, of the sort used to direct the night-firing of a power weapon, began playing about the yard like a child's toy searchlight. Hal snapped a shot with the silent, but low-powered, void pistol that was the only weapon he carried, at the source-point of the light and the beam vanished. But the damage was done. The darkness now would be alive with the electronic screaming of alarms and communications, pinpointing his position to his pursuers.
He went to full speed. Even then, clearing the fence before him into the yard next to the one where the courier ship waited, his senses of hearing and smell counted five of those who sought him, on hand to block his way. They were too many to slip by. He could hear each now, plainly, while they would not be able to hear him; but they would have heat-sensing equipment and with it could see him as a glow amidst the scattered junk filling the yard; a glow imprecise in outline and occulted by the shapes of the junked vehicles and trash filling the yard, establishing his general position, nonetheless.
The choice was no choice. If he wanted to reach the ship, there was no way to do it unobserved. He must fight his way through those who were here to take him. He dropped to the gritty earth underfoot to catch his breath for a second.