It needed little enough thought to see how he had to do it. His position was hardly different from that of a man in a river, and about to be swept over a waterfall, who calls to a friend safe on the bank to jump in and help him. But the hard facts of the matter were, he knew he was more important to the large work yet to be done than was Simon Graeme. Nor would Simon - or any other Dorsai - thank him for not calling for help when it was needed, under such circumstances.
Savagely, he pressed the button at his waist that would send out a single gravity pulse to the ship's sensors and summon Simon to his aid.
Having called, he gave himself wholly over to survival, dropping flat in the dirt of the yard and squirming his way forward toward the further fence. He could hear the five men closing in upon him; and knew that they would shortly be reinforced. He stopped, suddenly, finding himself boxed. To move in any direction from the ruins of a tractor behind which he was presently sheltering was to put himself into the open field of fire from one of the "executives." Now, he must make gaps in their circle about him, if he wanted to pass through.
He did not need a visible guide-beam for the weapon he carried. He could aim accurately by ear; and the silentness of the void pistol in use would help to hide the point of origin of its killing pulse. He shot one man, and shifted quickly into the gap this made, only to find himself boxed again. And, so it began…
It was an ugly little battle, fought in the dark, at point-blank range, with his opponents' numbers being reinforced faster than his accurate fire could clear them out of his way. A bitterness stirred inside him; the bitterness of someone who has had to fight for his life for too many years, on too many occasions, and who is weary of the unceasing attacks that give him no rest. Crouching and moving through the dark, he felt for the first time in his experience the burden he carried - not the physical but the emotional weight of his three lifetimes.
He had fought his way now for half the remaining distance between him and the last fence. He was less than five or six meters from it; and the number of his enemies in the yard had grown to more than fifteen. He stopped in passing over the body of one of those he had just taken out of the action and picked up the heavy shape of the power rifle the man had been using. And at that moment, Simon came over the wall from the ship.
Hal heard him come; and knew who he was. The "executives," hearing nothing, suspecting nothing, were caught by void pistol fire from a new angle and assumed that Hal had reached the fence. They changed direction to move in on the position Simon now held.
Hal gave them a slow count of five. Then, standing up in the darkness and holstering his nearly depleted void pistol, he triggered the power rifle he had picked up onto continuous fire; and swept it like a hose of destruction across the front of those making the sounds of movement through the yard.
There was sudden, appalled inactivity among the weapons of those still left unhurt among the attackers. In that moment, Hal threw the power rifle from him, far across the yard, to where the clatter of its fall would draw any fire well away from Simon and himself - and ran for Simon's position, hurdling the barely-seen obstacles in his path.
They were suddenly together, two patches of darker dark in the gloom.
"Go!" grunted Simon.
Hal went up and over the fence, without pausing, checked on the far side, and swung about, void pistol held high over the fence to cover Simon as the other followed, landing beside him. They ran together for the courier ship. The outer airlock door yawned before them, with Amid ducking hastily back out of their way, then closed behind them. Simon hurled himself at the controls; and the courier ship bucked explosively into motion - upward into the night sky.
There were police craft holding station overhead, in positions up to four kilometers of altitude. But barely above the rooftops, Simon went into phase shift; and suddenly the silence of orbital space was around them. Hal, who had been standing, holding to the back of the co-pilot's seat against the savage acceleration off the ground, let go and sagged limply backward into one of the backup seats of the control compartment.
He felt a touch on his elbow, turned his head to look into the face of Amid, standing beside him.
"You need sleep," said Amid.
Hal glanced again at Simon, but Simon had already finished his plot for a second shift, and the stars jumped as they watched, to a new configuration in the screens about them. Ignoring them, Simon reached to the plotting board for the next shift and Hal stood up.
"Yes…" he said.
He let Amid lead him back into his own compartment and stretched out in the bunk, unprotestingly letting Amid pull off his boots and his heavy outer jacket. Exhaustion was like a deep aching, all through his body and mind. He lay, staring at the gray metal of the compartment ceiling, a meter and a half above his bunk; and Amid's head moved into his field of vision, between him and it, looking down.
"Let me help you sleep," said Amid; and his eyes seemed to begin to grow enormously as Hal watched.
"No." Hal shook his head, fractionally. It was a great effort even to speak. "You can't. I have to do it for myself. But I will. Just leave me."
Amid went, turning out the compartment lighting, closing the door behind him. Hal stared up into sudden lightlessness; feeling again the weight of his lifetimes, which had come upon him in the darkness of the yard. He turned his mind like a hand holding up the stone of consciousness, letting that stone fall from the grasp that held it, fall into darkness… and fall… and fall… and fall…
It took them five days, ship's-time, to make Earth orbit. Most of that time Hal slept and thought. The other two left him alone. When they parked at last in Earth orbit, Hal called up a jitney to take him down to the planet's surface.
"And Amid and me?" asked Simon. "What do you want us to do? Wait here?"
"No. Go and wait for me at the Final Encyclopedia," answered Hal. "I'll be a day - at most two. No more."
Chapter Sixty
Riding the upcurrent above the brown granite slope of the mountainside in the late afternoon, high above the grounds of the Mayne Estate, the golden eagle turned his head sharply to focus his telescopic vision on the flat area surrounding the pool behind the building. There had been movement there - animal movement different from the movement of grass and twigs in the wind - where there had been no movement for a very long time.
His eyes fastened on a dark-clad, upright man-shape, tiny with the distance between them. There was no profit to be found in this, then, for a knight of the air like himself. The eagle cried harshly his disappointment and wheeled off, away from the estate and the mountainside, out over the thick green of the upland conifer forest.
Hal watched him go, standing on the far edge of the terrace overlooking the lake. A little, cold breeze rippled the gray surface of the water, and, above him, in the declining afternoon light, the blue of the sky was the blue of ice. Here, in this northern temperate zone of Old Earth, summer still held to the lowlands; but up in the mountains the first cutting blasts of winter's horn could be faintly heard. The cold, moving air chilled the exposed skin surfaces of his body and out of old days and memories came a piece of a poem to fit itself to the moment…
O what can ail thee, knight at arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing…
It was the first verse of the original version of La Belle Dame Sans Merci - "The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy" - a poem by John Keats about a mortal ensorcelled by a fairy, but without the limiting term to that ensorcelment found in its poetic ancestor - True Thomas. The older poem had been written by Thomas of Erceldoune back in the thirteenth century, from even older versions of the legend passed down by word of mouth.