Heavily, he began to do what little gathering of papers and possessions was necessary. He had been deluding not only Ajela, but himself, by pretending that the question of his staying was still open.
He had not been able to face Ajela with that truth over the lunch table. She would not have pressed him for reasons, he knew, being an Exotic; but she would have - and still did - deserve some. Only, he would not be able to give her any. So he would simply sneak out of the Encyclopedia, after all, as he had, in effect, sneaked in; and he would send both her and Tam a message afterwards, once he was irrevocably on his way among the stars.
He finished up, coded the number of his exit port into the room control, and stepped out the dilated entrance into a short corridor that took him down and through another entrance, past another screen from which an elderly woman perfunctorily scanned his papers, and into the port chamber.
There was a forty minute wait before he could board the ship. But five minutes later he was in his compartment, and forty minutes after that, the ship sealed and lifted. An annunciator woke over his head.
"First phase shift in two hours," it said. "First phase shift in two hours. There will be a meal service immediately after the shift. All portside compartments, first seating; all starboardside compartments, second seating."
He was in a portside compartment; but he was not hungry - although in two hours, knowing himself, he would probably be starving, as usual. He sat down on that one of the two fixed seats in the compartment that was below the bed folded up against the bulkhead.
Once they had phase-shifted, there would be no direct communication possible with the Encyclopedia. At once, they would be light-years distant; and a message physically carried by a ship inbound to Earth would be the quickest way of getting in touch. He did not feel up to talking face to face with Ajela, in any case; but something in him rebelled at waiting to tell her until he was well away. She would be looking at the time and thinking that he had decided against going, and was working with the Encyclopedia - and she would hear from him about dinner time.
He roused himself, stepped across to the tiny desk against the wall of his compartment opposite the bed, sat down on the other seat, and coded a call to the ship's communications center. The screen lit up with a heavy man in ship's whites.
"I'd like to send a message back to the Encyclopedia," he said.
"Certainly. Want the message privacy coded? And written of spoken?"
"Spoken," he said. "Never mind the privacy code. It's to Ajela, Special Assistant to the Director. 'Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go.' "
His own voice repeated itself back at him from the screen.
"Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go."
"That's all?" said the shipman.
"Yes. Sign it - my name's Hal Mayne - " he checked himself. "Wait, add on… I'll see you both again, as soon as I can.' "
"Ajela. I'm sorry. I had to go. I'll see you both again, as soon as I can. Hal Mayne." The screen gave his words back to him once more.
"All right? Or did you want that last sentence as a p.s.?" asked the shipman.
"No, that's fine. Thank you."
Hal broke the connection and got up from the seat. He pulled the bed down into position and stretched out on it. He lay on his back, looking at the ceiling and bulkheads of his compartment, which showed the same flat brown color everywhere he looked. A faint vibration through the fabric of the ship around them was the only sign that they were under way; it would be the only sensation of movement to be felt - and not even that during phase shift - until they went into docking mode in New Earth orbit.
There had never been any possible decision except that he should go on to Coby. But it had taken the Encyclopedia to help him see the inevitability of it; and even then the recognition had come in through the back door of his mind. It had been the poem that had told him, its images speaking from his unconscious, as surely as the images of Walter, Malachi and Obadiah had spoken from it on his first night in the great sphere. He was the knight and was summoned in one direction only.
The poem had been no more than a codification of that oceanic feeling he had touched when he worked with the Encyclopedia. Blindly there, he had felt something, some great effort, that rang its particular call trumpet-like, reading back through him. For a little while, unknowing, he had touched what could be - and it was so large in promise that it dwarfed all other things. But the way to it did not lie through a dusty scholar's cell, or even by way of Tam's desk in the Encyclopedia. At least, not yet. There were things within him that would have to grow to match in size what he had felt in the Encyclopedia; and some deep-buried instinct had come to tell him clearly that these would not grow in a sterile, protected environment. It was out among the materials of which the race was made that he must find the particular strength he would need to use the mighty lever that was the Encyclopedia. And, once he had found it, he would be back - whether he was wanted or not.
The faint vibration of the ship thrummed all through him as he lay. He felt caught, like someone apart, suspended between all worlds, waiting.
Chapter Five
As the spaceship to New Earth pulled away from Earth orbit preparatory to its first phase shift into interstellar space, the awareness of his utter loneliness moved in on Hal all at once. In the Final Encyclopedia, thanks to Tam and Ajela, he had not felt completely alone; and until he had gotten to the Final Encyclopedia the anesthesia of shock and his training had held the realities of his new orphan's status at a numb distance from his emotions. But now, unexpectedly a full appreciation of it flooded him.
That first night on shipboard he dreamed a vivid, colorful dream in which it turned out that the events on the terrace and the deaths of Malachi, Obadiah and Walter had been nothing but a nightmare from which he had just awakened. He felt foolish, but inexpressibly relieved to discover that the three of them were still alive and all was well.
Then he awoke to reality, and lay in the darkness, listening to the faint breathing of the ventilating system of the ship, echoing out through the grille on the near wall of his stateroom. Emptiness and desolation filled him. He pulled the bedcovers over his head like a very young child, and lay there, cold, in his misery, until, at some unknown, later time, he fell asleep again, to other dreams he did not remember on awakening.
But from then on the awareness of his isolation and vulnerability was always with him. He was able to push it into a back corner of his mind, but there it settled, as if in some dark corner, where Bleys and the rest of the Others seemed also to crouch, waiting. He realized now that he had made a serious mistake in not asking that this passage from the Encyclopedia be booked for him under a false name.
The situation was not completely irreparable, of course. Once he got to New Earth, he could cancel the reservations made under the name of Hal Mayne, and then make new reservations to Coby under an alias. At most, then, this ship's records would only show Hal Mayne as going no farther than New Earth. But the record of his having been outbound from Old Earth aboard this ship would remain, for the Others to find.
A cooler part of his mind told him that even travelling under his real name as he was now, the passenger record would not be easy for Bleys to run down. It was not that ship's records were not kept and that the Others could not eventually get access to them all. It was simply that, given the mass of interstellar shipping and the complexity of individual records on fourteen worlds, it became a statistical nightmare to search through all of these in an attempt to trace or locate a single individual.