"No," he said.
"Even better." She passed the papers back. "I can't do anything for you directly; but I can send you to someone who's probably - probably, note - safe to buy from. He's not so safe you can trust him with what you've been doing since you joined Rukh."
"I understand." He stowed the envelope with its papers once again in the inside pocket. "Can I get to him at this time of night?"
She stared at him so directly her gaze was almost brutal.
"You could," she said. "But you're ten paces from collapsing. Wait until morning. Meanwhile, I can give you some things to knock down that infection and make sure you sleep."
"Nothing to make me sleep - " The words were an instinctive reflex out of the years of Walter the InTeacher's guidance. "What sort of medication were you thinking of for the infection?"
"Just immuno-stimulants," she said. "Don't worry. Nothing that does any more than promote your production of antibodies."
She half-turned to leave, then turned back.
"What did you do to my dogs?" she asked.
He frowned at her, almost too exhausted to think.
"Nothing… I mean, I don't know," he said. "I just talked to them. You can do it with any animal if you really mean it. Just keep making sounds with your mouth like the sounds they make and concentrate on meaning what you want to tell them. I just tried to say I was no enemy."
"Can you do it with people?"
"No, it doesn't work with people," he smiled a little out of his exhaustion. After a second, he added - "It's a pity."
"Yes, it's a pity," she said. She turned away fully. "Stay where you are. I'll get things for you."
Chapter Thirty-one
He woke suddenly, conscience gripping him sharply for some reason he could not at the moment recall. Then it exploded in him that he had let himself be talked into sleeping rather than continuing on his feet to whoever it was could sell him passage off Harmony.
For a moment, half-awake, he lay on whatever bed he had been given, feeling stripped and naked, as lonely and lost as he had felt in that moment four and a half years before, when he had turned away from the shadows on his terrace and the physical remains of Walter, of Malachi and Obadiah. In this moment between unconsciousness and full awareness, he was once again a child and as alone as he had ever been; and under the massive pressure of the weariness and feverishness that held him, the overwhelming urge in him was to curl up, to bury his head under the covers once more and retreat from the universe into the warm and eternal moment he had just left.
But, far off, like a strident voice barely heard, a sense of urgency spoke against further sleep. Late… already late… said his mind; and the urgency pulled him like a heavy fish out of deep water back to full awareness. He sat up staring into darkness, finally made out a faint line of something like illumination below eye level and two or three meters from him, and identified it as light coming faintly beneath a closed door.
He got to his feet, groped to the door, found its latch and opened it. He stepped into a dim corridor with light bouncing from around a corner at its far end, to faintly illuminate the walls and floor where he stood. He went toward the light, turned the corner, and stepped into the room where he had first confronted Athalia McNaughton, a room now lit from its unshaded windows with the antiseptic light of pre-dawn.
"Athalia McNaughton?" His voice went out and died, unanswered.
He went to the only door other than the entrance in the room, and pulled it open. Beyond was a small office stacked with papers and a tiny desk, at which Athalia was now sitting, talking into a phone screen. She switched off and looked over at him.
"So you woke up on your own," she said. "All right, let me brief you, feed you, and put you on your way."
When he rode out through the pipe-iron gates forty-five minutes later, beside her in a light-load truck, the Militia vehicle had vanished from the yard. He did not ask about it and Athalia offered no information. She drove without speaking.
He had no great desire for conversation at the moment, himself. His few hours of rest had only worked to make him aware of how feverish and tired he was. With one voice, all the cells of his body cried for a chance to rest and heal themselves. The immuno-stimulants were hard at work in him, and the fever was down slightly - but only slightly. His throat and chest burned, although the overwhelming urge to cough was now controllable by methods Walter had taught him; and that was something for which he was grateful. He had no desire to draw attention to himself with the sounds of sickness that might cause anyone who came close to him to pay particular attention to him.
Athalia had also made an offer of painkillers and ordinary stimulants. But both would interfere with his own mental control, the effects of which on his weakened body he could judge more accurately than its response to drugs; and on being refused she had turned immediately to the problems of getting him to the person who could sell him the interworld passage he needed. The man's name was Adion Corfua. He was not a native Harmonyite but a Freilander; a small shipping agent who did not sell interworld passages himself, but knew brokers from whom cancelled tickets, or those not picked up within the legal time limit, could be bought - at either a premium or a discount, depending upon the world of destination and the buyer demand.
"I'll drive you to a point close to the terminal," Athalia told Hal. "From there you can catch a bus."
After that, it would be a matter of his following directions to the general shipping office out of which Corfua worked.
The morning had dawned dry and cool, with a stiff breeze, a solid cloud cover, but no prospect of rain. A gray, hard day. Just before Athalia dropped him off at the sub-terminal where he would catch the bus, she drew his attention to a compact piece of tan luggage behind his seat, the sort of case in which interworld employment contracts were carried by those who had business with them.
"The contracts in it are all legitimate," Athalia said, "but they're from workers who've made their round trips. They won't stand up to being checked with employers; but for spot inspection, they're unquestionable. Your story should be that you're making a sudden, unexpected courier run. It'll be up to you to come up with a destination, an employer there and a situation in which contract copies are needed in a hurry."
"Industrial sabotage," Hal said, "destroyed some files in an interworld personnel clearing house on the world I'm going to."
"Very good," said Athalia, nodding and glancing at him for a moment, then back to the Way down which they were travelling. "How do you feel?"
"I'll make it," he said.
They had reached the sub-terminal of the bus line. She handed the case to him as he got out. Standing on the pavement of the sub-terminal with the case in one hand, he turned and looked back at her.
"Thank you," he said, "remember me to Rukh and the rest of the Command when you see them."
"Yes," she said. Her eyes had darkened again. "Good luck."
"And to all those James sent his message to, at the end there," Hal said, "good luck."
The words, once they were spoken, sounded out of place in the hard, prosaic daylight. She did not answer, but sat back in her seat and pressed the stud that closed the door between them. He turned away as she drove off in the truck; and walked over to stand at the point where he would be boarding the bus.
Twenty minutes later he stood instead at the general desk of the shipping office with which Adion Corfua was connected.
"Corfua?" said the man on the general desk. He punched studs, looked into the hidden screen before him, and then glanced off to one side of the room behind him in which a number of desks were spread around. "He's here today; but he's not in yet. Why don't you take a seat at his desk? It's the third from the wall, second row."