Hal continued moving. Now that his suspicions had been confirmed, his eyes picked out five other individuals, four men and one woman, standing about the kiosk, who did not fit the normal patterns and movements of the crowd in the square.
The movements of all crowds, Malachi had told him, fell into patterns which were continually changing, but only to related patterns. The old Dorsai had trained young Hal first with a kaleidoscope - a tube with a rotatable end which, when turned, rearranged triangles of color as seen through a prism - then by standing him on a balcony overlooking a shopping center square in Denver, much like this one. The day had finally come when Hal, looking down, could immediately identify all the individuals Malachi had hired to play watchers in the square. It was not by specific actions or the lack of them that Hal had come to recognize those who were anomalies within the patterns. Rather, they had come eventually to jump to his eye, subjectively; as, at first glance, in gestalt fashion, the spuriousness of a fake painting jumps to the eye of an art expert who knows intimately the work of the painter being imitated.
Just so, now, the five men standing about the square jumped to Hal's eye from among the individuals surrounding them. There might well have been others seated at cafe tables, whom with closer study he might have picked out; but what he had now discovered was all he needed to know. He continued casually, but turned off immediately at the same corner he had turned off at before. He began to walk as swiftly as he could without attracting attention.
Once again, the shirt under his jacket was damp with sweat - the sweat of tension and exhaustion. Clearly, the Ahruma area generally had now been warned and his picture made available to anyone selling interstellar passages - and particularly to such as Corfua, who probably worked close enough to the line of legality to be known to the local police. On recognizing him, Corfua, to save himself, would have had no choice but to alert the Militia.
By this time the whole Commercial Center, and possibly the whole terminal, would be under observation and search for him. The only question remaining was whether he could get to the terminal entrance and escape from it before he was noticed, even in his new jacket and beret, and the searching forces closed in on him.
He continued to walk, fast but not so fast as to attract undue attention. He passed nearly a dozen men and women whom he identified as anomalies in the patterns around him; although whether all of them were watching for him or for someone else, was anyone's guess. In a few minutes he had turned a final corner, and one of the entrances to the terminal was before him, with the front end of a line of buses to inner-city Ahruma just visible outside it.
Four black-uniformed Militiamen were checking the papers of everyone entering and leaving through the entrance.
He had altered course automatically, even as he saw them, so that now instead of heading directly toward the entrance, he was headed off to one side of it. He continued, increasing the angle of his change in direction as he went until his route became a curve leading him down a corridor paralleling the front face of the terminal.
It was a temptation to tap his adrenaline reserves once more, if only for a minute or two, simply to forget briefly the physical discomforts that were clamoring for his attention. But he was aware how little his remaining strength was. Effortfully, he put aside the alluring notion of the anesthesia of self-intoxication, and set himself grimly, as he walked, to thinking the situation through in his present fogged and fever-lit mind.
The enemy he faced, he reminded himself, was not the Militia but Bleys. The Militia was only a tool. Bleys must fear him for greater than usual reasons, or the Other Man would not have put into motion this large an effort to capture him. The goal must be his capture, not his death; Bleys could have made sure of his destruction back on Coby by simply arranging the deaths of all those at the mines where Hal was suspected of being. From what Hal had always been given to understand, the use of such bloody means to achieve a relatively small result would not be at all out of character for one of the Others.
Bleys, then, wanted him alive for some specific reason; therefore Hal's goal must be to either keep himself from being captured or make his capture as worthless as possible. It seemed clear that friendless, alone and ill as he was, he stood almost no chance of being able to get away from this terminal without being taken by the Militia. There were things he could and would try, but the fact of his capture had to be faced; and the question therefore was to make that capture as unrewarding as possible.
One way he could do that was to make sure that the credit vouchers and identity papers that made it possible for him to move between the worlds were not taken if he was captured; so that if he had the luck to get free of Bleys and his people, he could regain them and with them the means to escape to another planet.
Still struggling to think of ways to do this, he had paid little attention to where he was going, turning down streets at random. He was only half a block from the square where he had been to meet Corfua, when he suddenly caught sight of a line of black uniforms, a little less than a block distant, across the street and moving toward him.
They were beginning to sweep the interior of the terminal - or the interior of the Commercial Center, at least - for him. The thought of the mobilization of troops required for such an effort brought home to him with a chill more clearly than anything else had done the kind of power that the Others must wield here on Harmony. Idly, he stopped to look into a shop he was passing, gazed for a second, then as idly turned and began to move back the way he had come.
As he did, his steps quickened. He reached the end of the street and turned left, looking for a postal kiosk. A couple of blocks farther down this new street, he found one. A small amount charged against one of the Harmony-local vouchers he had been supplied with as a member of the Command caused a slot in the kiosk to disgorge a large envelope, already stamped with local postage. Hastily, he took his identity envelope from his inside jacket pocket, stuffed it into the envelope, and sealed it. He addressed the envelope to Amid, Outbond to the Department of History, University of Ceta. On the bottom in capital letters he printed HOLD FOR ARRIVAL. A screen on the kiosk, questioned, gave him the address of the local Maran Consulate in Ahruma. He memorized it even as he had the kiosk print it on his package. Then he slipped the sealed and addressed package into the mailing tray of the kiosk, which inhaled it with a soft, breathy sound. Empty-handed and momentarily lightheaded with triumph, he turned away from the kiosk.
Now it was only a matter of taking the best of what chances were left to get free of the terminal. There was one means that might allow him to bluff or bully his way past the Militiamen guarding the entrances to the Commercial Center. He might be able to do it if he was dressed as a Militiaman himself - preferably in the uniform of a superior officer. The problem would be to find an officer among those hunting him here whose clothes he could wear with any conviction that they belonged to him. An alternative - the thought struck him suddenly - would be to get the papers of one of the men in civilian clothes that had been stationed around the square and try to make his way out on the strength of those, in his present garb.
He was still only a block from the square. Something like enthusiasm beginning to rise in him for the first time that day, he turned away from the kiosk.
"There he is - that's him!"
It was the voice of Adion Corfua. Looking, he saw the pale, large figure, with two men in civilian clothes and five Militiamen, coming toward him from the direction in which he had just been about to go. He wheeled to escape, and saw another line of Militia just entering the intersection at the end of the block behind him.