Godlun stared at him.
"But you keep fighting !"
"Of course!" said Child. "I am of God, whatever or whoever else is not. I must testify to Him by placing my body against the enemy while that body lasts; and by protecting those that my small strength may protect, until my personal end. What is it to me that all the peoples of all the worlds choose to march toward the nether pit? What they do in their sins is no concern of mine. Mine only is concern for God, and the way of God's people of whom I am one. In the end, all those who march pitward will be forgotten; but I and those like me who have lived their faith will be remembered by the Lord - other than that I want nothing and I need nothing."
Godlun dropped his face into his hands and sat for a moment. When he took his hands away again and raised his head, Hal saw that the skin of his face was drawn and he looked very old.
"It's all right for you," he whispered.
"It is fleshly loves that concern thee," said Child, nearly as softly. "I know, for I remember how it was in the little time I had with my wife; and I remember the children unborn that she and I dreamed of together. It is thy children thou wouldst protect in these dark days to come; and it was thy hope that I could give you reason to think thou couldst do so. But I have no such hope to give. All that thou lovest will perish. The Others will make a foul garden of the worlds of humankind and there will be none to stop them. Turn thee to God, my brother, for nowhere else shalt thou find comfort."
Chapter Twenty-two
Sometime in the depths of that night following the dinner, Hal awoke in the long room that had been given the visitors for a dormitory; and, looking down the double row of mattresses with their sleeping forms, decorated by the lozenges of illumination from the moonlight shining through the uncurtained windows, saw all quiet and still.
He rose on his elbow, troubled by the feeling of uneasiness with which he had wakened, but unable to account for it. Then from a distance came a small, repeated sound that gave his mind no picture of what could be causing it. It came from outside the room, through the open windows at the far end. He got up, walked on unshod feet to the end of the nearest of the open windows and looked out. In the courtyard below him where the service had been held, he saw a man's figure, black in the moonlight, seated on one of the benches with its shoulders hunched. As he watched, the shoulders shook, the right hand of the figure went up to the mouth and the sound came again, recognizable now as coughing. With that recognition, his mind identified the familiar shape of the figure; and he did not have to look back into the room behind him to see what mattress lay under empty covers.
The man down there was Child-of-God. Hal stood watching while two more of the paroxysms of coughing shook the figure, then turned and went back to his own bed. Child-of-God did not come back to the room as long as he lay awake, watching; and after a while, Hal fell asleep once more.
They were on their way the next morning while dawn was still red in the east. Godlun's entire household turned out to see them off and fill their packs with cold foods packaged by the kitchen to see them through until evening and the next family that would put them up for a night. The leavetakings they had been engaged in with members of the family had been as warm as if they had been members of the family itself.
Once on the road, Child took the lead as usual without a word. Watching the older man, Hal could not see anything in the leathery face and swift stride of the older man that might indicate a cause for the moonlit fit of coughing in the courtyard the night before. But he found himself studying Rukh's lieutenant with reawakened interest.
By day, Child showed no sign of weakness or illness. He led them at a steady pace through the next few weeks; and it was not until five days later that Hal, waking in the night, discovered the older man missing once more from the sleeping room assigned to them at that night's farm. Looking outside, Hal once more discovered Child seated like someone waiting out a bout of pain, and occasionally breaking into coughing.
Hal probed the rest of their group with cautious questions; but evidently none of the others had ever heard or seen Child on one of these nighttime excursions; and any suggestion that the Command's Second Officer might be ill was met with the light-hearted belief that he was made of metal and leather and no weakness would dare attack him.
They finally reached their rendezvous. It was the Mohler-Beni farm, a large place operated jointly by two separate families, so that a good hundred and twenty-odd people were normally in residence and the coming and going of the additional near two hundred of the reunited Command would not attract as much attention as their activity would on one of the farms of more average size. They were less than thirty kilometers from Masenvale, the small city that held the metals-storage unit and the fertilizer plant that were their targets.
The group containing Hal and Child was the last to arrive. It was at the end of an unusually warm summer day and after they had stowed their gear in one of the large equipment sheds which were being used as barracks for them, the fresh cool of the evening breeze was pleasant as Hal walked with the others to a late meal in the farm's main kitchen.
After the dinner, Rukh collected not only Child, but Hal, and took them off to her private room in the farmhouse - a guest bedroom now cluttered with papers and supplies.
"Howard," Rukh said to Hal, once she had shut the door of the room firmly behind them, "I'm asking you here now, not to discuss plans with James and myself, but to act as a source of information from that early military training of yours."
Hal nodded.
"Come over here to the map, both of you," she said.
They followed her to a table set up in front of an open window, the large-scale local map on it anchored with fist-sized polished stones against the newly-awakened evening breeze. There was a moistness and electricity in the air that promised a thunderstorm.
"James, I've just got word from our friends in Masenvale," she said. "They've promised at least half a dozen fires and the setting off of burglar alarms in four businesses on the south side to divert local police and Militia away from our targets. We're bound to run into some district police forces at the fertilizer plants, but with any luck the fires and alarms, to start with, and after that the raid by the group you'll be with, Howard, on the metals unit, should keep our opposition at the plant from being reinforced until we've loaded up and gone."
She turned to the table.
"Now, look here," she said.
"Here's the Mohler-Beni farm." Rukh put her finger down on the lower half of the map. "Almost due southwest is Masenvale with the fertilizer plant on the outskirts, on a direct line between us, here, and the center of the city, where the metals-storage is located. South-southwest…" her finger traced a line on the map around and beyond the city area, "are the foothills of the Aldos mountain range, which is the territory we'll be running for, after we've got the fertilizer - "
She broke off, for the sound of heavy air-cushion vehicles had intruded through the open window upon the conversation. She sighed, relaxing a little; and Hal looked at her, sharply. It was not usual for her to show any sign of emotion, even when gaining something like the transport that was now arriving, and which had been critical to the success of her plans.
"The trucks," she said.
They had been sweating out the arrival of these vehicles from farmers in the neighborhood well enough off to own them, and committed enough to the Command to risk them in an endeavor like the one Rukh was to lead tomorrow. The raids on the fertilizer plant and on the metals-storage building would have been literally impossible without transport; and there had been, until this moment, no absolute certainty that enough would be volunteered. Now, judging by the sounds that continued to come in the open window, the trucks had appeared in numbers that would be more than adequate to the needs of the Command. Rukh turned back to her map.