Part 7 (2/2)

I stammered, 'Oh, no, reverend sir. You see, I'm a stranger myself. Then you aren't the Reverend Baird?' I was in cold panic. Baird was my only contact with the brethren short of New Jerusalem; without someone to hide me I would be picked up in a matter of hours. Even as I answered I was making wild plans to steal another s.h.i.+p that night and then try to run the border patrol into Mexico.

His voice cut into my thoughts as if from a great distance. 'No, I'm afraid not, my son. Did you wish to see the Reverend Baird?'

'Well, it wasn't terribly important, sir. He is an old friend of my uncle. I was to look him up while I was here and pay my respects.' Maybe that nice Indian woman would hide me until dark?

'That won't be difficult. He's here in town. I'm just supplying his pulpit while he is laid up.'

My heart made a full turn at about twelve gee; I tried to keep it out of my face. 'Perhaps if he is sick I had better not disturb him.'

'Oh, not at all. A broken bone in his foot-he'll enjoy a bit of company. Here.' The priest fumbled under his robes, found a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote out the address. 'Two streets over and half a block down. You can't miss it.'

Of course I did miss it, but I doubled back and found it, an old vine-grown house with a suggestion of New England about it. It was set well back in a large, untidy garden-eucalyptus, palms, shrubs, and flowers, all in pleasant confusion. I pressed the announcer and heard the whine of an old-style scanner; a speaker inquired: 'Yes?'

'A visitor to see the Reverend Baird, if he so pleases.'

There was a short silence while he looked me over, then: 'You'll have to let yourself in. My housekeeper has gone to the market. Straight through and out into the back garden.' The door clicked and swung itself open.

I blinked at the darkness, then went down a central hallway and out through the back door. An old man was lying in a swing there, with one foot propped up on pillows. He lowered his book and peered at me over his gla.s.ses.

'What do you want of me, son?'

'Light.'

An hour later I was was.h.i.+ng down the last of some superb enchiladas with cold, sweet milk. As I reached for a cl.u.s.ter of muscatel grapes Father Baird concluded his instructions to me. 'Nothing to do until dark, then. Any questions?'

'I don't think so, sir. Sanchez takes me out of town and delivers me to certain others of the brethren who will see to it that I get to General Headquarters. My end of it is simple enough.'

'True. You won't be comfortable however.'

I left Phoenix concealed in a false bottom of a little vegetable truck. 1 was stowed like cargo, with my nose pressed against the floor boards. We were stopped at a police gate at the edge of town; I could hear brusque voices with that note of authority, and Sanchez's impa.s.sioned Spanish in reply. Someone rummaged around over my head and the cracks in the false bottom gleamed with light.

Finally a voice said, 'It's O.K., Ezra. That's Father Baird's handyman. Makes a trip out to the Father's ranch every night or so.'

'Well, why didn't he say so?'

'He gets excited and loses his English. O.K. Get going, chico. Vaya usted con Dios.'

'Gracias, senores. Buenas noches.'

At the Reverend Baird's ranch I was transferred to a helicopter, no rickety heap this time, but a new job, silent and well equipped. She was manned by a crew of two, who exchanged pa.s.s grips with me but said nothing other than to tell me to get into the pa.s.senger compartment and stay there. We took off at once.

The windows of the pa.s.senger s.p.a.ce had been covered; I don't know which way we went, nor how far, it was a rough ride, as the pilot seemed dead set on clipping daisies the whole way. It was a reasonable precaution to avoid being spotted in a scope, but I hoped he knew what he was doing-I wouldn't want to herd a heli that way in broad daylight. He must have scared a lot of coyotes-I know he frightened me.

At last I heard the squeal of a landing beam. We slid along it, hovered, and b.u.mped gently to a stop. When I got out I found myself staring into the maw of a tripod-mounted blaster backed up by two alert and suspicious men.

But my escort gave the pa.s.sword, each of the guards questioned me separately, and we exchanged recognition signals. I got the impression that they were a little disappointed that they couldn't let me have it; they seemed awfully eager. When they were satisfied, a hoodwink was slipped over my head and I was led away. We went through a door, walked maybe fifty yards, and crowded into a compartment. The floor dropped away.

My stomach caught up with me and I groused to myself because I hadn't been warned that it was an elevator, but I kept my mouth shut. We left the lift, walked a way, and I was nudged onto a platform of some sort, told to sit down and hang on-whereupon we lurched away at breakneck speed. It felt like a roller coaster-not a good thing to ride blindfolded. Up to then I hadn't really been scared. I began to think that the hazing was intentional, for they could have warned me.

We made another elevator descent, walked several hundred paces, and my hoodwink was removed. I caught my first sight of General Headquarters.

I didn't recognize it as such; I simply let out a gasp. One of my guards smiled. 'They all do that,' he said dryly.

It was a limestone cavern so big that one felt outdoors rather than underground and so magnificently lavish in its formations as to make one think of fairyland, or the Gnome King's palace. I had a.s.sumed that we were underground from the descents we had made, but nothing had prepared me for what I saw.

I have seen photographs of what the Carlsbad Caverns used to be, before the earthquake of '96 destroyed them; General Headquarters was something like that, although I can't believe that the Carlsbad Caverns were as big or half as magnificent. I could not at first grasp the immensity of the room I was in; underground there is nothing to judge size by and the built-in range-finder of a human's two-eyed vision is worthless beyond about fifty feet without something in the distance to give him scale-a house, a man, a tree, even the horizon itself. Since a natural cave contains nothing at all that is well known, customary, the human eye can't size it.

So, while I realized that the room I stood in was big, I could not guess just how big; my brain scaled it down to fit my prejudices. We were standing higher than the main floor and at one end of the room; the whole thing was softly floodlighted. I got through craning my neck and ohing and ahing, looked down and saw a toy village some distance away below us. The little buildings seemed to be about a foot high.

Then I saw tiny people walking around among the buildings-and the whole thing suddenly snapped into scale. The toy village was at least a quarter of a mile away; the whole room was not less than a mile long and many hundreds of feet high. Instead of the fear of being shut in that people normally experience in caves I was suddenly hit by the other fear, the fear of open s.p.a.ces, agoraphobia. I wanted to slink along close to the walls, like a timid mouse.

The guide who had spoken touched my arm. 'You'll have plenty of time for rubbernecking later. Let's get going.' They led me down a path which meandered between stalagmites, from baby-finger size to Egyptian pyramids, around black pools of water with lilypads of living stone growing on them, past dark wet domes that were old when man was new, under creamy translucent curtains of onyx and sharp rosy-red and dark green stalact.i.tes. My capacity to wonder began to be overloaded and presently I quit trying.

We came out on a fairly level floor of bat droppings and made good time to the village. The buildings, I saw as I got closer, were not buildings in the outdoors sense, but were mere part.i.tions of that honeycomb plastic used for sound-deadening-s.p.a.ce separators for efficiency and convenience. Most of them were not roofed. We stopped in front of the largest of these pens; the sign over its door read ADMINISTRATION. We entered and I was taken into the personnel office. This room almost made me homesick, so matter of fact, so professionally military was it in its ugly, efficient appointments. There was even the elderly staff clerk with the nervous sniff who seems to be general issue for such an office since the time of Caesar. The sign on his desk had described him as Warrant Officer R. E. Giles and he had quite evidently come back to his office after working hours to check me in.

'Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lyle,' he said, shaking hands and exchanging recognition. Then he scratched his nose and sniffed. 'You're a week or so early and your quarters aren't ready. Suppose we billet you tonight with a blanket roll in the lounge of B.O.Q. and get you squared away in the morning?'

I said that would be perfectly satisfactory and he seemed relieved.

10.

I guess I had been expecting to be treated as some sort of a conquering hero on my arrival-you know, my new comrades hanging breathlessly on every word of my modest account of my adventures and hairbreadth escapes and giving thanks to the Great Architect that I had been allowed to win through with my all-important message.

I was wrong. The personnel adjutant sent for me before I had properly finished breakfast, but I didn't even see him; I saw Mr. Giles. I was a trifle miffed and interrupted him to ask how soon it would be convenient for me to pay my formal call on the commanding officer.

He sniffed. 'Oh, yes. Well, Mr. Lyle, the C.G. sends his compliments to you and asks you to consider that courtesy calls have been made, not only on him but on department heads. We're rather pushed for time right now. He'll send for you the first spare moment he has.'

I know quite well that the general had not sent me any such message and that the personnel clerk was simply following a previously established doctrine. It didn't make me feel better.

But there was nothing I could do about it; the system took me in hand. By noon I had been permanently billeted, had had my chest thumped and so forth, and had made my reports. Yes, I got a chance to tell my story-to a recording machine. Flesh-and-blood men did receive the message I carried, but I got no fun out of that; I was under hypnosis at the time, just as I had been when it was given to me.

This was too much for me; I asked the psychotechnician who operated me what the message was I carried. He answered stiffly, 'We aren't permitted to tell couriers what they carry.' His manner suggested that my question was highly improper.

I lost my temper a bit. I didn't know whether he was senior to me or not as he was not in uniform, but I didn't care. 'For pity's sake! What is this? Don't the brethren trust me? Here I risk my neck -'

He cut in on me in a much more conciliatory manner. 'No, no, it's not that at all. It's for your protection.'

'Huh?'

'Doctrine. The less you know that you don't need to know the less you can spill if you are ever captured-and the safer it is for you and for everybody. For example, do you know where you are now? Could you point it out on a map?'

'No.'

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