When he returned, daylight was still a full hour off; and Child, when Hal looked into the Lieutenant's tent, was sleeping heavily. Hal went back to his own tent and found his own map viewer. Sitting cross-legged in the darkness while Jason slept undisturbed behind him, he put the stolen slide into it.
The small interior illuminant of the viewer, triggered to life by his finger pressure on its control, made the map leap into white, illuminated relief before him. It showed a stretch of rises and hollows of land, covered with scrub vegetation identical with the area they were now in. To the bottom of its display, a road ran almost horizontally across the map, to intersect with a crossroad near the lower right corner. Marked along the road were three asterisks, with code marks next to them.
The code marks were undecipherable, but a good guess could be made at what they represented. They would give details of the number of trucks and personnel who would be delivering supplies to the points the asterisks marked. It was the delivery of such supplies that allowed the Militia to travel light; and made up for the fact that the Militiamen themselves were, from lack of experience, slow and clumsy compared to the members of the Command. Also, the frequent contact with vehicles at the delivery points allowed for speedy evacuation of sick or hurt men; or any who might, for one reason or another, slow down the pursuit.
Hal mentally photographed the map, took it from the viewer and put it in his pocket. He went to find Falt and pay back the extra hour of watch the other had taken for him.
"You go get some sleep while you can!" Falt said. "James and Rukh are bad enough without you trying to imitate them and sleep less than half an hour out of the day and night together. I'm fine."
"All right," said Hal. He was suddenly unutterably conscious of his own weariness, and of a sort of light-headedness at the same time. "Thanks."
"Just get some sleep," said Falt.
"If you'll wake me as soon as Rukh gets up."
"Oh? All right, then."
Hal went back to his own tent. Crawling into his bedsack, with nothing but his boots and harness removed and his pockets emptied, he lay back in the dark, staring at the darkness under the tent roof, with one forearm flung up across his eyes. He realized suddenly that his forehead felt hot; and anger erupted in him. A number of the Command besides Child were beginning to show signs of minor infections as the unrelieved exhaustion exacted its price; but he had assumed that he, of all of them, should be immune to any such thing. He pushed the emotion aside as unprofitable. It was true he had been on his feet, with only brief naps, for several days now…
He woke suddenly to the awareness that he had been asleep, and that Falt, standing back, was shaking his left foot within the bedsack, to wake him. He blinked into full awareness.
"Have I been jumping on people who wake me?" he asked.
"Not jumping - but you do come awake as if you meant to hit first and open your eyes after," said Falt. "You'll find Rukh by the kitchen setup."
"Right," said Hal, pulling himself out of his bedsack and reaching for the contents of his pocket where he had laid them out earlier. He checked suddenly and looked back up at Falt. "At the kitchen? How long has she been up? A couple of hours? I asked you - "
Falt snorted, turned and went out.
Hal finished redressing and went out himself. Rukh, as Falt had said, was down where the kitchen had been set up on making camp the night before, standing, plate and fork in hand, to finish her early meal. She looked up at Hal as he approached.
"I made a short visit to the Militia camp early this morning - " he began.
"I know," she said, scraping her plate clean and handing it, with the fork, back to Tallah. "James told me he gave you permission. In the future, I'd like you to be a little more specific about why you want to make such a reconnaissance. I've told James to ask you for it."
"I wasn't too sure what I could find out," he said. "As it happened, I was lucky…"
He told her about Barbage and the two young Militiamen on watch.
"So I took advantage of the chance to go right into his tent," he said. "It's what I suspected. Barbage's not like the others. He's serious military. His tent shows it. Anyway, I got one of the maps from his case."
He handed her his viewer with the map already in it.
She put it to her eye and pressed the button for the illuminant. For a long moment she stood studying it without saying a word. Then she lowered the viewer, took out the map slide and handed the viewer back to him, putting the map in her pocket.
"It looks like the country up ahead of us," she said.
He nodded.
"It was in order with the other maps in his map case - I estimated three days march ahead."
"What good did you think it would do us to have this?"
"For one thing," he said, "it lets us check our own maps against it. No offense to the local people you got ours from, but what we have's a lot more sketchy and less accurate than this which has to be from breakdowns of regular survey information."
"All right," she said. "But we might have lost you; and you've become valuable to us, Howard. I'm not sure it was worth the risk."
"I thought," he said slowly, "we might consider hijacking some of those supplies they're sending him."
Her dark eyes were hard on him.
"It could cost us six to ten people, attacking one of those supply points. Do you think they send out trucks like that without adequate troops and weapons to protect it?"
"I didn't mean at the supply point," he said. "I thought we could take just a single truck, someplace along the route, since we know ahead of time where they'll be headed for."
She was silent.
"We can easily figure out the route a truck'll have to take to the supply point. The old hands in the Command tell me they don't generally send them out in group convoy, but one at a time."
"That's true," she said, thoughtfully. "Normally, they don't worry about a pursued Command having the time to get down to the roads. Also, it's easier to send out each filled truck as it's ready, than to struggle with a convoy of half a dozen to be unloaded all at once and brought back together."
"If you want…" He closed in on her first expression of interest quickly, "I can figure out the details of taking one of them, and you or Child could decide from there. Almost anything they'd be carrying would be something we'd need."
She looked at him soberly.
"How much rest have you had lately?" she asked.
"As much as anyone else."
"Which anyone else? James?"
"Or you," he said, bluntly.
"I'm Captain of this Command, and James is First Officer. Tonight," she said, "you're to be off any duty you're scheduled for. Tonight, you sleep. The next day, if you've slept through, bring me a plan for taking one of the trucks."
"We'll be only one day away from that map by tomorrow," he said.
"There're three supply points marked on it, each one at least a day apart. You're not going to lack time to plan."
There was no reasonable argument against that. He nodded; and was turning away to get something to eat himself, when his mind exploded suddenly with the understanding that had been gnawing its way out of his unconscious into his conscious from the moment in which he had first glimpsed the slide in Barbage's tent.
"Rukh!" He swung back to her. Her eyes stared questioningly at his face. "I knew there was something wrong! We've got to change route, right away!"
"What is it?" She had tensed, reflecting his tension.
"That slide. I knew something was bothering me about it. You said it yourself just now! It shows supply points for the next three to six days. Why would Barbage have arranged deliveries of supplies up to six days ahead along the road we just happen to be paralleling now? He knows we never move in the same line for more than two days at a time. Six days from now we'd be anywhere but close to that road, and his troops are right behind us!"