The rest of his words were covered by the sound of the blowers as Hal drove off. He watched the four of them in the truck's viewscreen until trees and bushes blocked them from sight; after which he closed the rear doors of the truck and drove with all safe speed to the road.
Bootless and carefully choosing where to set their feet, and with the driver as the only one who had seen the route they had followed from the supply point, the best speed the four could make through the woods on foot would take them at least a couple of hours to find their way back to the highway. After that, they would still have to choose between trying to walk in what was left of their socks, thirty or forty kilometers of this highway down to where it intersected with a more trafficked road; or finding their way back to the supply point and waiting there to be rescued.
In two hours it would be dark and their feet would be very sore. They would almost certainly choose to wait at the supply point. In any case, it would be several hours after dark before their return would be overdue enough to be noticed at the motor pool to which the truck belonged; and the first assumption there would be that, through accident or design, they were simply delayed and would be in by morning. It would probably not be until full morning of the next day that attempts would be made to check on them. Meanwhile, since Barbage would have assumed that by now this point had been abandoned, no one from his pursuit team would be likely to check on it.
So, it should be tomorrow before anyone learned that this truck was in the hands of Hal. He had at least the next ten hours in which to drive, with only the problem of avoiding a routine check on his credentials or his purpose for being on the road with a Militia vehicle.
Just before he turned onto the highway, Hal stopped to replace his own clothes with the driver's uniform. The driver had been both tall and heavy, so that the jacket was only a little tight in the shoulders, though the pants were enormous around Hal's waist; but even the other man's height had not been enough to provide sleeves and pantlegs that were other than obviously, almost ridiculously, short on Hal. Still, wearing the uniform and the cap - which fortunately was only a little loose on his head - and sitting mostly hidden in the cab of the truck, Hal could pass a casual inspection as a Militiaman.
Dressed, he keyed-on the truck's reference screen for a small-scale map of the general area between his present location and Ahruma. The map showed the city at a distance of something over two hundred and ten kilometers, with a spiderweb of roadways multiplying and thickening toward its center.
Somewhere on the city's south outskirts was one of the local people that Rukh's Command had been scheduled to contact, when at last it reached the city, a woman named Athalia McNaughton, who had a small business selling used farm equipment. She might be able to help him - if he could reach her. There would be the truck to dispose of and its contents to hide; and, while he had with him the identification and credit papers he had carried ever since leaving Earth, he would need information on how to use them safely. The only hope of escaping Bleys now lay in getting off Harmony.
Ahruma, he knew, because of its Core Tap and spaceship refitting yards, had a commercial spaceport even larger than that of Citadel, the city at which he had first set foot on Harmony; but any spaceport could be a dangerous place for him to try arranging passage unless he knew where to go and who to see when he got to the terminal.
If she could help, the odds were with him. She could have no idea that he was approaching her without Rukh's approval and orders. It might be a week or more before word of the splitting up of the Command could reach Ahruma partisans. On the other hand, his name and description would be known to her, as one of the Warriors under Rukh's leadership.
He clicked off the reference screen, punched on the trip clock, and having picked his route to the city, drove out onto the highway and turned right.
He drove for half an hour before he ran into any sign of other traffic. By that time he had covered over forty kilometers and was on a double-lane Way headed generally in the direction of Ahruma. The load which had been a full one for nine donkeys was a light one for the truck; and the vehicle hummed along at the legal military speed limit of eighty kilometers an hour. Without problems, he could probably expect to reach the city in about three hours.
Darkness closed in about him as he drove; and as the countryside surrounding the Ways he travelled on became more inhabited, artificial lighting blossomed to challenge it on either side of his route. Seated alone in the cab above the blowers, their breathy roar tuned down by the truck's soundproofing to a steady, soft humming, and with the illumination of the instrument panel softly glowing at him below the dimness of the windshield, his alertness began to yield to the lack of that emotional pressure which had kept him keyed up earlier. His body and mind relaxed; and, as it did so, his awareness of the fever, the headache, the cough and the fatigue that rode him like vampires became more and more acute.
For the first time he was able to measure the depths of his own exhaustion and illness; and what he found alarmed him. He would need to be at full alertness, and at something like full strength, from the time he parted company with Athalia McNaughton until he was safely aboard the ship taking him to some other world. The partisans in Ahruma might not know that he had left the Command; but it could not be more than twelve hours before the local Militia would; since he had dealt with the men he had captured so as to make it clear that his hijacking of their truck had been a solitary action.
It might be the better part of wisdom to see if Athalia could provide him with a few hours safe sleep at her place, before he tried the spaceport. He should be relatively safe until dawn. On the other hand, if he could use these same late night hours to get to the spaceport and buy his passage unsuspected, they were probably better utilized that way. Once aboard an interstellar ship, he could sleep as much as he wished.
Mind and body were becoming very heavy. He had to force his gaze to focus on the polished ribbon of the Way, that seemed to roll endlessly out of darkness before his forelights as he went. He debated tapping his overdrive reflex, once more - and once more put it from him. It would be easy and tempting to do, but wasteful of energy in the long run; and his energy was draining fast. He clicked on the reference screen again, and studied the maze of roads before him on the edge of the city. He had been eating up the distance on the open Way; but that sort of travel was reaching its end. Now came the time in which he would have to feel his way through fringe areas of the city by roadsign and map alone, to the front door of Athalia. This close to his goal he could not risk stopping to ask for directions from someone who might later identify him.
The night became one continuing blur of dimly-lit intersection and street signs. He took refuge in focusing down as he had days earlier when he had needed to think effectively toward a decision through the fog of sickness and fatigue; and his vision cleared somewhat. His reflexes were slower, and he slowed the truck accordingly, driving as circumspectly as he dared without drawing attention to a military driver who seemed to be exercising unnatural caution. Time, which had been in generous supply, began to run short. He checked the trip clock and saw that he had been driving now for nearly six hours. The glowing figures of the clock at which he stared made only academic sense to him. Subjectively, the time in the cab seemed to have been, at once, endless and no more than a handful of minutes.
He found himself at last guiding the vehicle down a narrow, fused earth road into the wilderness of a dark suburb, half small farms, half ramshackle cottages or small businesses. There was no light in the buildings he passed until he came to what looked like an abandoned warehouse, with a remarkably tall and new-looking highwire fence about it, and an invisibly large stretch of ground behind it. In one corner window at the front of the building, a window was illuminated.