Hal went over, and settled into the piece of furniture facing the indicated desk. It was not a float seat, but a straight-backed uncushioned chair of native wood, plainly designed to encourage visitors not to linger. But in Hal's present physical state, to sit at all rather than stand was a welcome thing. He sat, therefore, on the edge of dozing; and after some minutes the sound of feet beside him brought him fully awake again. He sat up to see a large, slightly overweight man in his forties with a thick black mustache and a balding head, taking the padded float behind the desk.
"What can I do for you?" said the man who must be Adion Corfua. His smile was a minimum effort. His small blue eyes were large-pupilled and unnaturally steady as they met Hal's.
"I need a passage to the Exotics," Hal said, "preferably to Mara. Right away."
He lifted the contract case from the floor beside him to show briefly above desk level, and dropped it to the floor again.
"I've got some papers to deliver."
"What's your credit?" asked Corfua.
Hal produced his travel envelope and extracted from it a general voucher of interstellar credit showing more than enough funds to take him to the destination named. He handed these to Corfua.
"It'll be expensive," said Corfua, slowly, studying the voucher.
"I know what it'll cost," said Hal; and made the effort necessary to smile at the other man, as Corfua looked over the top of the voucher at him. Athalia had told him approximately what the other should charge for a passage to Mara. In his present feverish and exhausted state he had no interest in bargaining; but to be too unconcerned about the cost of the trip would make people suspicious.
"What's the problem?" Corfua laid the papers on his desk.
"Some papers destroyed by industrial sabotage, there," he said. "I'm carrying replacements."
"Oh? What papers?"
"All I'm interested in with you," said Hal, "is finding a passage."
Corfua shrugged.
"Let me talk to some people," he said. He got up from behind the desk, picking up Hal's identity and voucher. "I'll be right back."
Hal stood up also and took the papers neatly back out of the other man's hand.
"You won't need these," he said, "and I've got a few things to do. I'll meet you at the central newsstand kiosk in the terminal, in twenty minutes."
"It'll take longer than that - " Corfua was beginning.
"It shouldn't," Hal said. Now that he had actually locked horns with the other man, his head was clearing and his early training was upholding and guiding him. "If it does, maybe I should find someone else. See you at the kiosk in twenty minutes."
He turned and walked away without waiting for agreement, out of the shipping office. Once beyond its entrance and beyond the sight of anyone there, he stopped and leaned for a second with one shoulder against a wall. The spurt of adrenaline that had activated him for a moment had died as quickly. He was weak and shaky. Under the jacket of the brown business suit with which Athalia had outfitted him, his shirt was soaked with sweat. After a second he straightened up, put his papers back in their envelope and walked on.
His greatest safety in the terminal, Athalia had not needed to tell him - although she had, anyway - lay in keeping moving. Standing or sitting still, he could be studied. Moving, he was only one more in a continually swarming crowd of faces and bodies that, even to trained observers, could at last all come to look very much alike.
He moved, therefore, about the maze of internal streets, shops and buildings almost at random. Half the Spaceport Terminal was taken up by this Commercial Center, which was like a small city under one roof. The other half was an industrial complex that dealt with the maintenance, repair and housing of both visiting ships and those being worked over in the Core Tap-powered Outfitting Center, only a few kilometers away. Even after three hundred years of interstellar spaceflight, the phase-shift ships, even the smallest courier vessels, were massive, uneasy visitors to a planetary surface. Those landed here were of course completely out of sight of any of the people thronging the Commercial Center. But the awareness of their nearness, and the reminder in that of the great interstellar distances beyond Harmony's atmosphere, shrank the human self-concept and made for a Lilliputian feeling, not only with regard to the crowds filling the Commercial Center, but about the architecture and furnishings surrounding them.
It was with this feeling, superimposed upon the protests of his ill and overextended body and joined to the nervous awareness of a hunted animal, that Hal moved about the Center. He was stripped down to a sensation of being beaten and naked in the midst of enemies, a traitor to all who had trusted him. To save the lives of those in the Command, he had taken it on himself to remove from it not only himself, but the materials for the explosive. In effect, he had betrayed the others, knowing both actions were ones Rukh would never have agreed to, if asked. Only luck could reunite the Command now with what he had carried off in the truck, and lead it to the completion of its planned mission.
But the alternative had been death for all the rest of them; and after the self-sacrifice of James Child-of-God, Hal had found himself unable to face the prospect of more death among these people to whom he had become close.
Perhaps he had been wrong to take matters into his own hands; but there had seemed no other choice. Only, he had never felt so alone in his life - so alone, in fact, that part of him was a little astonished that he still possessed the will to resist capture, control, and possibly death. But yet he was continuing to resist, instinctively and innately. Under his mind-numbing exhaustion, his illness and the sorrow of parting with the first humans he had come to feel deeply at home with since his tutors' deaths - under the desperation of his present situation - an instinct of resistance entirely independent of his will burned steadily with the fierceness of ignited phosphorous.
He pulled himself from the whirlpool of his thoughts and emotions that was sucking him down into himself It was almost time to meet Adion Corfua at the central newsstand kiosk.
He walked to the end of the interior street he was on and checked the map of the Center. He was only the equivalent of a couple of city blocks from the large central square, edged with sidewalk cafes and filled with plantings and fountains, that held the kiosk. He turned toward the square.
A block from it, he stepped into a clothing shop to buy a blue jacket and gray beret, of the cut he had remembered seeing on New Earth, when he had transferred spaceships there on his way to Coby. Outside the shop, he discarded in a sidewalk trash incinerator the bundle containing the brown jacket he had been wearing when he had met Corfua. Slumping to reduce his height, he went on to the square and began to wander casually around it, observing the kiosk and the people clustered about it out of the corner of his eye.
Corfua was there, standing by a wall of the kiosk and apparently absorbed in reading a news printoff he had just bought. Around the agent there was a little space with no people, the closest one being a man in a green leisure jumper who was scanning a screen with listings of book publications. Hal, who had planned to continue around the square if he had not found Corfua, turned off again up the street at the next corner. He went around that block entirely, coming back into the square at its next corner, turning back and moving in the opposite direction down the side of it he would have gone along next if he had not turned off.
Adion was still there, still seeming to read. The man in the green jumper still scanned the screen. Around them, there was still a small area without any other person.