"The minute I try that, they'll start shooting!" The driver's face was agonized. "God save us! God save us - "
Falt took his sidearm from his shirt again.
"Go around," he said, softly. "It's the only way."
The driver threw a quick glance at the weapon.
"If you shoot me at this speed, we'll all crash," he said bitterly.
Hal put his right hand up with the thumb on one side of the back of the driver's neck, his fingers on the other. He exerted pressure and the driver made a small sound.
"When I snap his spine," said Hal to Falt, "you take the wheel."
"I'll go - I'll go around," husked the driver. Hal released the pressure on the other's neck but kept his fingers in place.
"At the last moment, only," Falt said to the driver. "I'll tell you when to leave the road. Hold steady, now… hold steady… now!"
At the last moment the barricade had seemed to jump at them. The Militia on either side of it had been waving their arms for some time to command the vehicle to a halt.
"Hit it! Up the speed! Hit it - now!" Falt was shouting at the driver.
But the driver had already dug his finger into the throttle button and the truck was off the road and sliding in a tilted curve over the open ground alongside it like a saucer being sailed into a strong wind. Its body rang as power weapons struck the skin of the van with energy bolts that generated explosions of high temperature in the material. The windshield and the window on the driver's side starred suddenly, as if hit by solid birdshot; and the driver cried out, his hands flying up from the wheel. Falt grabbed the wheel and pulled the truck, skittering, back onto the route beyond the barricade and the sharp-pointed pylons anchored in concrete just beyond. His finger pressed down the throttle again, and abruptly they were flying up the route once more, while the barricade, the figures and the pylons behind it dwindled rapidly in the distance.
The driver was huddled against the cab door at his side.
"Where are you hit?" Falt was demanding.
"Oh God!" said the driver. "Oh God - oh God…"
"Howard," said Falt, "take a look at this man, find out where he's hit and lift him over the back of the seat, out of my way, if you can."
Hal stood up, holding to the back of the seat before him and bent over the driver, reaching down to pull him back from the door. A fingernail-sized stain was visible high on the left side of the driver's shirt. Pressing the cloth tight against the man's body as he went, Hal felt for and found wetness on the man's back at a roughly opposite point, then ran his hands over the shirt and the upper areas of the driver's pants, as far as he could reach, bending over the driver as he was.
"Are your legs all right?" he asked the driver.
"Oh, God…"
Hal put his hand gently once more on the man's neck.
"Yes - yes," the driver almost yelped. "They're all right! My legs are all right!"
"You got a single needle through your left shoulder, high up," Hal told him. "It's nothing serious. Now…"
He massaged the back of the other's neck.
"Now, I'm going to help you up over the back of your seat. I want you to do as much as you can to get over, yourself. Come on, now…"
He reached down with both hands and put them under the driver's armpits. He lifted. The driver scrambled upwards with both arms and legs. Abruptly he screamed and tried to slide back down into the seat again; but Hal held him and half-pulled, half-lifted him over the back of the seat by sheer force. The driver screamed again as the back of his knees bumped over the back of the seat.
"My leg! My leg - oh, God!"
But Hal, with the other already on the floor on his back behind the seats, was checking a stain on the outside of the other's left leg, just above the knee.
"Looks like you've got a needle through the leg, too," he said. "Can you bend it?"
The driver tried and did, but screamed a third time.
"Looks like that one could be more serious," said Hal. "The needle's hit something in there."
He felt under the leg.
"And it looks as if it's still in there."
"Oh God - "
"He's faking," said Falt clearly. "There's no way it could be hurting him that much."
Hal put a hand over the man's mouth.
"You've got a choice," he said quietly in the other's ear. "Now I know and you know how that leg of yours hurts. But we also both know it only hurts when you move it; and that you should move it as little as possible. Neither wound is going to kill you. So, lie still; and either you keep quiet or I'll have to make sure you're quiet because you're unconscious. Do you understand?"
Part of his mind was appalled at what he was saying; but another part nodded in bleak approval at this evidence of how well he had learned his lessons once upon a time. For a moment he could almost imagine the harsh, old bass voice of Malachi Nasuno echoing behind his own. He had spoken the words he had just said as if he had read them off a blackboard in Malachi's mind.
But the results were successful. The driver now lay motionless and silent. Hal stood up, clinging to the back of the seat before him; and saw that Falt was now behind the wheel and holding the truck steady as it fled.
"Pick up the map and navigate," said Falt.
Hal slipped around into the empty seat Falt had vacated. He picked up the map from the cab floor before the seat.
"Are we still on the route?" he asked, glancing ahead through the windshield, for what he looked out on was now a two-lane roadway of crushed gravel.
"No. Two turns off. Local Way Ten - find it there?"
Hal looked.
"Yes," he said. "We turn off Way Ten on to Way One Hundred Twenty-three, and off that on to Demming Road - follow Demming Road to the first path, unnamed, turning off to the right. We make a ninety degree left turn off that path after one point eight kilometers, and take out over open country. We go on a compass reading of forty-three minutes, twenty-four seconds, for point six of one kilometer, and that brings us to the gathering point."
"All right," said Falt. "Now direct me."
They continued according to the directions Hal had spelled out, as the sky brightened above them and the open woods along the back country roads began to emerge into visibility from the solid blackness that had earlier held everything beyond the cast of the truck's lights. Hal glanced back once to check on the driver, who had been silent all this time, and saw him still as he had been, lying on his side with his eyes closed - either unconscious or determined to attract no further attention to himself.
They came to the gathering point finally in the first somber light of the dawn; by then the whole woods was visible around them, although the sun was still hidden behind the mountains to their right. Waiting for them there, shielded from telescopic observation by a tight clump of variform elms, was a pile of packsaddles and related equipment surrounded by fifteen placid donkeys, tethered to the surrounding tree trunks or limbs. There was no one with them. The local farmers were clearly willing to donate their livestock, but only at minimum risk to themselves.
The truck halted. Falt punched the button to open the back doors. He and Hal, with the rest of the team, got out of the truck and began the process of getting the wounded onto their stretchers, once each of these had been slung between two of the donkeys, and loading the remaining animals with the bags of fertilizer as well as the ingots of high-tin solder, which would be cut up and used as payment for equipment the Command would not be able to get by donation along the way.
They were finishing this when a wild voice shouted at them.
"That's right - go off and leave me to die!"
They all looked toward the sound of it. In one of the cab doorways, the driver lay propped on one elbow, the closure of his shirt pulled open halfway by his effort to crawl there, his eyes bloodshot and face contorted. Without a glance at each other, both Falt and Hal walked over to the cab, while the rest of the team turned back to getting the donkey train ready to move out.