Now Rukh and the rest were being seriously hunted. Because of him. What it amounted to, in the end, was that what the driver had shouted after him had been no more than the literal truth.
Chapter Twenty-five
Drawing lines with a stick in the dirt at his feet to echo the estimated paths of travel of the teams, and the Militia truck units in pursuit of them, Hal came to the conclusion that at his best possible speed he could reach the rendezvous only after the rest had arrived there. But that would still be before the Militia would be dangerously close. He put the viewer back into his pack, erased the lines he had drawn in the earth, and took both a line of sight and a compass heading on the position of the rendezvous, ahead of him in the foothills below.
He began his journey.
He had come a long way back toward good general physical condition in his time with the Command; but he was still not in training for what he might once have done in the way of covering the ground, even back as a fifteen-year-old on Earth. Then, even laden with pack and weapon, he might have chosen to run the whole distance - not at any great speed, but at a steady jog that would have eaten up the kilometers between him and his destination.
As it was, he started out at a fast, smooth walk that was the next best way of covering ground in a hurry. He had had little sleep the day before and he had been up all night. The first two kilometers were work; but by the end of that time his body had warmed to the effort and his mind had moved into the necessary state of mild trance in which he could, if necessary, continue moving until he dropped without really taking conscious note of his fatigue.
This state once achieved, he effectively abandoned the effort of his travel to the automatic machinery of his body and let his mind go off on its own concerns.
Primary among these now was the fact that his presence in the Command was dangerous to it and its members. Treading on the heels of that fact was that Bleys had now located him, and was clearly ready to go to large efforts to lay hands on him. The best assumption from this was that Bleys, at least - and probably the Other Men and Women as a whole - had concluded that he could be dangerous to them. The effort made to find him on Coby might have indicated only something as small as curiosity on Bleys' part. But what was happening now seemed to indicate more than that.
He was conscious of a feeling of being rushed. He had gone to Coby only to hide out until he was grown enough to protect himself; and until he had a chance to make up his mind as to the specifics of what he wanted to do - with regard to the Others, and to his own life. Now, they were threatening to lay their hands on him and he still did not know how he should fight them, let alone conquer them. His conscience stirred and accused him of letting time slip by these four years, of living in a childish illusion of unlimited time available, until it was too late to decide what had needed to be done from the beginning.
The territory he was passing through was open, for the most part, and his speed was undiminished by the need to go around natural obstacles in his path. From time to time he either took advantage of an open space that gave him a view of the land lower down, or climbed a tree that would offer the same prospect. On his first survey of this kind, he had seen only one of the three Militia vehicle columns out in plain view on a Way. The other two he had to search for; but eventually, he found their vehicles parked and the troops inside them presumably on foot, already penetrating into the hills.
The column that had been still in motion on the Way when he looked the first time had been the column furthest forward, the one that had obviously been intended to cut into the foothills ahead of the fleeing Command. At his second look, this column also had parked, at a point short of being level with the rendezvous; and the Militia in it had taken to the woods. The point from which they had done so reassured him that he would reach the rendezvous, himself, at least a couple of hours before they would be far enough into the wood to cross a trail left by any of the teams on their way there. However, any trails they did cross would be impossible to miss. It was not possible to run donkey trains through an open forest without making it clear even to an untrained eye that they had passed.
He was tempted to step up his pace. But his teaching had been to look ahead in instances like this; and it was plain that merely reaching the Command would not mark the end to his working day. He kept, therefore, to the same steady walk, and let his mind go back to the problem of Bleys' pursuit of him and the question of what his own actions should be under the circumstances.
He was still working with this problem when he finally walked into the temporary camp at the rendezvous site. The day had gone while he had been travelling, and there was no more than a couple of hours of sunlight left. He had been holding fatigue at bay until this moment; but the sight of the tents already set up, the sounds of evening activity and the cooking smells that had gone before to draw him into the camp made him suddenly aware of the weariness in his legs and body.
"Howard!" called Joralmon, spotting him as he walked in. "We were beginning to worry about you!"
Joralmon got to his feet from the cone rifle he had disassembled and spread out before his tent on a cloth for cleaning. He came toward Hal, followed by everyone else close enough to hear the words, and free enough to break off what they were doing.
Hal waved them aside.
"Where's Rukh?" he asked. "I need to talk to her."
Hands pointed. Hal went on toward a tent at the far end of the camp, the others falling back as he turned from them, and paused just outside its closed front flap.
"Rukh?" he called. "It's Howard. I've got to talk to you."
"Come in, Howard."
Her voice was clear and strong from within the tent and he pushed his way in to find her seated on a camp chair at a temporary table that had a map spread out upon it, and Child sitting opposite her. They both looked up at him.
"What is it?" asked Rukh, her eyes on his face.
"Three units of Militia are after us," he said. "I saw them from higher up, after I dropped off the driver of our truck at his cabin."
He told them what he had seen, and what he had estimated.
"Two hours before they cut our trail?" Rukh frowned. "But how close are they likely to cut it? How much time from then until they find us?"
"No telling," said Hal.
He leaned over the map, which showed the foothills beyond Masenvale and pointed with his finger as he talked. "Figuring their travel time through the woods to give them a maximum distance by the time it took me to get here, I drew an arc to cut the trails of our teams, getting here, and the arc cut the closest of the trails almost right here at the rendezvous. But that's looking at the best they'd be able to do. Where they'll really cut one of them depends on the angle to our line of travel, on which they came into the woods. Straight in, at a ninety-degree angle to the Way where they left their vehicles parked, it'd take them two hours to cross one of our trails. At more than ninety degrees, it'd take longer, but then they'd be headed back the way they came, which isn't likely. At a more acute angle, it'd also take them longer, to reach the trail - but they could strike it right on top of us, here."
Rukh picked up a ruler, set its markings to the scale of the map before them, and measured the distance between the points Hal had indicated.
"Perhaps a third more time to cross our trail at this point here," she said, thoughtfully, while Child bent his harsh visage above her moving hands. "A maximum of forty minutes beyond the two hours you figured, Howard. It'll take us at least half an hour to break camp and get on our way; and we won't be ready to travel properly, at that. But there's no choice."