The guard stared up at him.
"You're the man they're looking for so hard, aren't you?" he blurted out.
"Never mind that," said Hal. "The door to the metals room - ?"
"I - code KJ9R on the control keyboard - " The guard nodded almost eagerly toward the other side of the room. "The one under the large screen, there. That's the truth, that really opens it."
"We know." Hal smiled at him. "I was just checking. Lie down where you are, now, and we'll tie you up. You won't be hurt."
The other Command members with him converged on the guard; and Hal took the power rifle with him as he went back toward the door. As they began to tie the man up, he stepped to the screen the guard had indicated and keyed in the code the man had given. Rukh had explained to him that the Commands normally had little trouble finding out ahead of time the information they would need for raids on places such as this; but it was the practice to always check such information when that was possible. Holding the power rifle, he went back out to the corridor.
"The metals door ought to be open now," he told a senior member of the Command, a man named Heidrick Falt. "The guard gave me the same code Rukh had."
Falt nodded, his eyes thoughtful upon Hal. Falt had been named group leader for this raid. Rukh's instructions had been to let Hal lead only on the way in. As far as Hal could tell, Falt had not resented that exception to his authority; but it was a relief to hand the command back to the other man, now.
"Good," said Falt. He had a reedy voice too young for his face and body. "We'll start to load up. You go back and sit with the driver."
"Right." Hal nodded.
He left the building. Outside, the square showed no change. It still seemed to slumber under the same lights and shadows as before; and from the outside the metals unit sat with the same air of impregnability it had seemed to wear earlier. He turned the corner, reached the truck and climbed back into the cab. In the small interior glow of the instrument panel the driver turned a round face toward him in which there was no hint of friendliness.
"Ready to go?" he said.
"A while yet," Hal answered.
For a moment he played with the idea of trying to break through the shell of enmity in which the other had encased himself. Then he put the thought aside. The driver was too tense to be reached at this moment. The concern here was not with how much he might fear and dislike Hal but with whether, as not infrequently happened with local volunteers, his nerve might snap with the waiting, causing him to drive off and leave the raiding party stranded. It was to guard against this that Falt had sent Hal back here. The less said between the two of them right now, the better.
They sat, and the minutes crawled by. The driver shifted position from time to time, sighed, rubbed his nose, looked out of the window then back at the instrument panel, and made a dozen other small movements and sounds. Hal sat still and silent, as he had been taught to do under such conditions, deliberately removing a part of his attention from the present moment and reaching out into the abstract universe of the mind. In the present semi-suspended state of consciousness that resulted, it seemed to him that he could almost feel beside him the presence of Rukh, who would now be at the fertilizer area. He felt her as if she was both there, and here with him at the same moment. It was an eerie but powerful sensation; and a poem began to shape itself about it, in the back of his thoughts.
And if it should not be you, after all -
Down the long passage, turning in the hall;
Or slipping at a distance through the light
Of streetlamped corners just within my sight;
I will not then turn back into my room,
Chilled and disheartened wrapped in angry gloom;
But warm myself to think the mind should send
So many shades of you to be my friend …
The poem disturbed him. It was not right, somehow. It was too light and facile, not cast in the way he normally thought or had been taught to think. But at the same time it rang with a sense of something discovered he had not known before. It seemed to echo off things completely removed from his present reality, things half-hidden in corners and cul-de-sacs of personal pain that he had never known and could not now remember - lonelinesses that had no proper part of life as he now knew it. For a moment, something moved far back in his mind; he seemed to feel an echoing, down endless centuries of moments such as this, in all of which he now remembered being isolated and set apart from others. Uneasily, he pushed the memories from him. But they returned, along with barely-registered sensations of pains he did not remember ever feeling, as if he had known them all, and been the one within them all…
The door to the cab opened. Falt looked inside.
"Open the back doors," he said. "We're coming in."
The driver touched a control stud on his instrument panel. Behind them they heard the doors trundle apart. Hal moved back from the cab section into the body of the van to help with the loading of whatever metal the Command had lifted from the unit.
"What are they?" he asked, as heavy, smooth gray ingots began to be passed in to him by those standing on the pavement outside the doors. "What did you bring?"
"High-tin solder," panted Jason, passing in his personal burden. "About forty ingots all told. Not too much to carry, but it ought to convince the authorities this was what we were actually after and the fertilizer warehouse business was the diversion."
Taking and stacking the ingots, Hal put the poem and the ghost memories firmly from him. He was back now in the ordinary universe, where things were as hard and heavy and real as the ingots of solder.
They finished loading and drove off. Falt took over the passenger seat in the cab, but kept Hal there to talk to him as they went.
"I think we ought to head for the foothills, without trying to rendezvous with the rest at the fertilizer warehouse," Falt said. "What do you think?"
"And give up the idea of splitting the metal up among the other trucks, so that if we lose a truck or two, we don't lose it all?"
"That's secondary," said Falt. "You know that. Our whole raid was secondary to the fertilizer raid; and we took longer than Rukh estimated to get things done here. No, the main thing is to get as many of us as possible safely back to the Command. I think the hills are safer."
"A dozen people on foot," Hal said, "won't be able to move very far or fast with all those ingots, once we leave the truck. We've gotten away clear. No one's chasing us; and if the rest of you left those guards tied up right it could be hours before the alarm goes out on what we did. I'd say make the rendezvous."
Falt had been sitting sideways on the seat to look back at Hal, now squatting on the small space of open floor in the cab behind both seats. At Hal's answer, Falt turned his head back to look out the windshield of the truck. They were skimming at good speed above the concrete strip of one of the main routes radiating from the center of the city.
"We must be halfway to the fertilizer warehouse now - isn't that right, driver?" said Hal.
There was a slight pause.
''Almost," said the driver, slowly.
Falt looked over at him.
"You'd rather head for the foothills now?" he asked.
"Yes!" The answer was explosive.
"We don't know what's happened at the fertilizer area," Hal said. "They could need another truck and the help of the extra dozen of us."
Falt blew out a short breath, staring through the windshield again. Then he looked first back at Hal, then at the driver.
"All right," he said. "That's where we'll go."
When they got to the turnoff from the route that was closest to the fertilizer plant, there was a redness to be seen above the skyline of buildings to their left.