Hal had to stop and think back to what Malachi had told him.
"If you left it there indefinitely," he said, "either your body'd build some kind of shielding tissue around it, or it'd work its way out, eventually - maybe a few years from now. Unless it carried some material in with it, like dirty clothing, it probably won't infect; and gun needles generally don't, because their sharpness sends them through things a slug from missile weapons might push ahead of it into the wound it makes. You'll still want to get it taken out of your leg as soon as you can."
He considered the man for a moment.
"You'll be all right for a few days, in any case."
"But I mean - " The driver broke off. The now-strong daylight, coming through the drunken window-eye to push apart the shadows of the cabin's interior, showed his face both crafty and pale. "You're going to leave me something for the pain, aren't you?"
"Sorry," said Hal. "I've got nothing to give you."
"What do you mean?" the driver's voice rose. "I saw you put your stuff into the truck. You've got to have painkillers in that med kit in your pack - I know all you Command people carry them for when you get wounded! You've got some and you can give me some!"
Hal thought of Morelly, with the old lines of his face deepened as he lay on the stretcher.
"We carry that sort of thing not for ourselves," he said, "but for our brothers and sisters in battle when the time comes that they need it. It's not for you, even if you had to have it - which you don't."
He turned and went out the door to the truck. He opened its rear doors and, gathering his equipment, began to pack it and put it on. As he did there was a sound from the door of the cabin. Glancing over, he saw that the driver had managed to pull himself as far as the doorway to stand propped up there.
"I suppose you think I owe you some thanks?" the driver shouted. "Well, I don't! It's all right when our own people want to fight the Militia, but you don't even belong. You with your foreign accent and your pretending to help! What did you do to make them hunt you like that? You made all the trouble. Everybody who got hurt in this got hurt because they were already looking for you! I've got these needles in me because of you - just you. And you think I'm going to thank you? I wouldn't thank you for anything. You know what I say? I say damn on you! Yes, you heard me - I say the damnation in God's name upon you…"
He was still shouting as Hal closed the rear truck doors and turned about, fully outfitted at last in his gear, and went away from stream and cabin into the woods. He heard the driver's shouting continue for some distance after he was obviously out of sight. There was a heaviness and a bitterness in him that would not be gotten rid of; even though he exercised his mind as Walter the InTeacher had taught him, to put aside the anger that had surged up in him at the last words of the man behind him. Walking steadily south through the mountain woods, it occurred to him with a touch of wonder that when he had explained to the other why he could not give painkillers to him, he had thought and spoken unconsciously, for the first time in his life, as a Friendly. The thought suddenly wiped clean from him the heaviness and bitterness triggered by the reactions of the driver; the sadness in him that such as Rukh and Morelly - and Child-of-God - should pay the price of the life they had chosen for someone who understood and valued that price so little.
For a little while, he walked through the morning-lit woods, bemused by this new development within him. He had imitated Obadiah, but until now he never reacted in his own right as a Friendly. Like the slow but powerful effects of some heavy shock, he felt an understanding of this stern culture flooding through him - an understanding he had never had before. But even as he realized this, he understood further that he had only begun to grasp that understanding, that he must be content to wait now, to put it aside to be wrestled with at some other opportunity, when the first heavy effects of it would have been absorbed enough to make it possible to stand back and look at the shape of this new comprehension that had just come to him, in detail.
He came finally out into what he had been searching for, an open spot on the mountainside where he could overlook all the foothills and the area beyond where the city of Masenvale sprawled. He glanced down the flank of the earth on which he stood and saw the dished-in, downward swoop of forested slopes that seemed to march to the very edge of the dark oval that was the city. He reached into his pack, took out the field viewer there, and put it to his eye, dialing it into focus on one point, then setting it on automatic adjustment as he swung about to survey the lower area.
With no great difficulty, he picked out the still-smoking fertilizer storage area, then traced the route he and the others had taken in the truck until he came to the point where the barricade still stood. Taking the viewer off automatic to put it on full magnification, he saw that a second row of barricades had been set up on the other side of the pylons they had passed and that the dark-uniformed figures seemed to be keeping a watch now in both directions, instead of merely toward anyone coming out from the city. Beyond this change, the barrier looked as if it had never been encountered - except for a curve of flattened roadside weeds and other small growth that marked the track of the fans of their truck where they had swung out around it; and the addition of a troop carrier truck, that now stood by the far side of the road, looking as if ready to move at a second's notice.
He moved the viewer on, and found the gathering point where he had parted with the rest of the team. The back of his mind, trained early to remember such things, threw up a perfect image of the map he had held to navigate Falt to that point; and he swung the viewer to check the other gathering points that had been marked on it. All but two were now empty of donkeys and equipment; and neither of the teams now loading up in them had Rukh among them.
He began to search forward along the routes he estimated each team would take from the gathering points to the rendezvous deep in the foothills. Once they were under the trees there, of course, he would not be able to see them. He located more than half of the teams, including his own; but was still not able to find the one Rukh was with, although he located the one led by Child. All the teams he could see were close upon the foothills. It looked as if everyone had gotten away safely, he thought; and then a movement on the traffic ways farther down the slope caught his eye as he panned the viewer about.
Focusing in, he located a column of six troop carriers, raising a faint plume of dust along one of the gravel-surfaced Ways as it headed in at an angle to the foothills some kilometers ahead of the rendezvous. Panning the field viewer backwards along the slope, he found three more plumes of dust and focused in on three more columns of carriers. He stood watching them through the viewer. There was no point in their moving in on the foothills in force that way unless the carriers were loaded with armed Militia; and the organization of the pursuit he now saw testified either to the fact that columns and their personnel had been waiting on a standby basis, or that the Militia had been informed of the fertilizer and metals raids ahead of time.
But they could not have been informed ahead of time; not only because of the unlikelihood of anyone connected with Rukh's Command in this effort being a traitor, but because if the Militia had known, they would of course have been set up around the sites of both raids. It would have been far easier to take the members of the Command that way than to pursue them into the foothills.
The only possible conclusion was that they had been on standby - and that the driver had been correct. They had been on standby for the single purpose of capturing Hal; and only one man could set such a large effort in motion for that purpose. Bleys Ahrens must now be sure that he was on Harmony. The tall Other Man must have seen to it that the Militia, planet wide, had been made acquainted with Hal's face; and the Militia officer called Barbage must have recognized Hal and reported seeing him after he had escaped following the ambush of the Command in the pass.