She started to turn away.
"James, Howard!" she said to them. "Come back upstairs with me and we'll finish what we were doing - "
"Wait a minute!"
It was the voice of the accordionist, interrupting her. She turned back to face the crowd; and the local man, leaving his instrument on the ground, came forward toward her and Hal. The other locals edged after him.
"Him," said the accordionist, when he stood within arm's length of her, looking past her at Hal. "He's the one they're looking for, isn't he? If he is, hadn't we ought to be told about that?"
"What are you talking about?" said Rukh.
"This one," the accordionist pointed to Hal, meeting Hal's eyes squarely. "Isn't he the one all the fuss is about? And if he is, what's he doing coming along on something like this, when just having him with us can be dangerous?"
"I'll give you one more chance to explain yourself," said Rukh. "This is one of our Command members, Howard Immanuelson. If the Militia are looking for him, they're looking for all of us."
"Not like they're looking for him," said the accordionist. He glanced aside at Child, who had drawn close on the other side of Rukh. "They've got his picture up everywhere; and there's a special officer - one of the Elect, about forty years old, named Barbage, spending his time doing nothing but heading up the search. He's got the whole district looking for this Immanuelson. Like I say, it's dangerous just having him here with you, let alone taking him along on a raid. For everybody's sakes, he ought to be cleared out of the territory."
"This officer whom thou callest of the Elect - although when was one of God's enemies such?" broke in Child. "Is he taller than I am, with black hair and a way of squeezing his eyes together when he blasphemes in his attempt to use godly speech?"
The accordionist looked at him.
"You know him, then?"
Child looked at Rukh.
"It was the officer who commanded the ambush against us in the pass," said Child. "He saw both Howard and myself."
"But it's Immanuelson he wants," the accordionist said. "Ask anyone around here. What's he wanted for?"
"You don't ask that of the Warriors of the Commands," said Rukh. Her voice was clear and hard.
The other's eyes fell away for a second time from the gaze she bent on him, then raised stubbornly again.
"This isn't just a Command matter," he said. "We all came to help you, not knowing you had him with you. I tell you, he's a risk to all of us, just by being here! If you won't tell us why they want him so much, you ought to get rid of him."
"This Command is my responsibility," Rukh said. "If you join us, you take directions. You don't give them."
She started to turn away once more.
"That's not right!" called out the accordionist; and there was a small mutter from his fellow truck drivers to back him up. She turned back. "This is our district, Captain! We're the ones who have to put up with the Militia after you've gone and your raid's been made. We don't mind that; we even come to help you make it - like this. But when we're part of what you do we ought to have a say in the way you do it, when you make it risky for us. Why don't we vote on whether he goes or not? Wasn't that the way the Commands always used to operate - just like the mercenary soldiers? They had the right to vote, didn't they, if their leaders wanted to do something the majority of them didn't want?"
For a moment no one said anything in the farmyard.
"The mercenary code," Hal said, hearing his voice sounding strange in the new silence, "only allowed troops to vote down their officers when at least ninety-nine per cent of them - "
His words were overridden by a verbal explosion from Child-of-God.
"Ye would vote?"
They all turned to him. He stood, shoulders wide, hands a little raised at his sides and his head jutting forward, staring at the drivers.
"Ye would all vote?" The echoes of his voice cracked off the walls of the buildings surrounding them on three sides. "Ye, with the milk of your farms wet on your lips, the muck of stables thick on your boots, ye would vote on whether one who has fought for the Lord should be kept or sent away?"
He took two steps toward them. They stood without moving, watching him - almost without breathing.
"Who are ye to talk of voting? Howard Immanuelson hath fought by the side of those in this Command, as ye have not. He hath labored with us, walked with us, gone cold and hungry with us, to oppose the Belial-spawn and their minions; while ye have not, only grown up soft and played and danced under their indulgence. What business is it of such as ye that a Warrior of the Lord is being specially searched for in thy district? Ye are the fat and useless sheep on which our enemies feed. We are the wolves of God - and ye would raise your voice to command us?"
He paused. They stood, unmoving; even the man with the accordion seemed to be caught like a fly in the amber of Child's anger.
"I tell ye all now, so that ye may remember, that what ye fear so has no meaning for us," he said. "What is it to us who fight, that this district of thine should be under special search for Howard Immanuelson? What matter if all the districts between these two mountain ranges should be in search for him, or if this continent, this world, and all the worlds at once should be searching for him? Were none but the two hundred of our Command opposed by all other humanity, and should they offer us a choice of immediate destruction or all that we wished to gain, if only we would give up one of us - our answer would be the same as if a child in the roadway asked the same question of us, in our full and weaponed power."
He paused again. In his lined face, his eyes were dark as starless space.
"Ye so fear, some of ye, to be in the company of Howard Immanuelson?" he went on, at last. "Then take thy trucks and go. We have no need of such as ye, nor of anything ye have, for we who fight stand in the shadow of the Lord, who is all-sufficient!"
He stopped speaking and this time did not start again. Hal glanced at Rukh, remembering her relief when she had heard the sound of the trucks arriving. But she stood, watching the drivers and saying nothing. Beyond, the other members of the Command also stood and said nothing. Like Child, like Rukh, they waited, their eyes on the truck drivers. At last, one by one, the drivers stirred and began to move away from one another, each of them going to a truck and turning about to wait beside the door on the control side of the cab. Last of all, the man with the accordion dropped his eyes, turned and went to stand by the single vehicle that still lacked someone beside it.
"All right," said Rukh. She spoke dryly; but in the continued stillness her voice seemed to ring almost as loudly as Child's. "Teams, gather at your trucks. Team leaders, brief your drivers on where they're to take you and what's expected of them. James, Howard, come with me."
She led the two of them back to her room and to the interrupted briefing session.
Chapter Twenty-three
The metals-storage unit of Masenvale was a windowless concrete box surrounded by a high, static-charged fence and lit at night by floodlights that showed the fortified gatehouse and the heavy locked entrance doors stark against the surrounding darkness. It stood alone, in the warm, lowland spring night following the one on which the trucks had arrived at the Mohler-Beni farm, surrounded by a square, two business blocks from the District Militia Headquarters, in the downtown area of this middle-sized city. The relative darkness inside the windowed gatehouse made the man on guard there invisible to the twelve members of the Command who had been driven to the edge of the square by the man who owned the accordion. He had parked the vehicle around the corner from the square in the shadows between two floating street lights; and his passengers, Hal among them, had quietly slipped out of the van into the shadows, and were now gathered just behind the corner of a building facing on the square. The driver had remained with the truck, the vehicle facing away from the scene, his motor switch on warm, with his finger on the switch and the idle position only a finger-twitch away.