Hal sat up on the seat.
"You alive back there?" said Hilary.
"Yes," answered Hal.
"We'll be there in a few minutes, Howard," said Jason. "Let me talk to Rukh about you, first. It'll be her decision as to whether you're allowed to join her group, or not. If she won't have you, I'll come back with you, too; and we'll stay together until Hilary can find a group that'll have us both."
"You'll be on your own, if I have to take you back," said Hilary. "I can't afford to keep you around my place for fear of attracting attention."
"We know that," said Jason.
The van went up and over a rise of the terrain, and nosed down abruptly into a valley-like depression that was like a knife-cut in the slope. Some ten or twenty meters below was the bed of the valley, with a small stream running through it; the stream itself was hardly visible because of the thick cluster of small trees that grew about its moisture. The van slid down the slope of the valley wall on the air-cushion of its fans, plunged in among the trees, and came to a halt at a short distance from the near edge of the stream. From above, Hal had seen nothing of people or shelters, but suddenly they were in the midst of a small encampment.
He took it in at one glance. It was a picture that was to stay in his mind afterwards. Brightly touched by a moment of the sunlight breaking through the ragged clouds overhead, he saw a number of collapsible shelters like beehives the height of a grown man, their olive-colored side panels and tops further camouflaged by tree branches fastened about them. Two men were standing in the stream, apparently washing clothes. A woman approaching middle age, in a black, leather-like jacket, was just coming out of the trees to the left of the van. On a rock in the center of the clearing sat a gray-haired man with a cone rifle half torn down for cleaning its parts, lying on a cloth he had spread across his knees. Facing him, and turning now to face the van, was a tall, slim, dark young woman in a somber green bush jacket, its large number of square pockets bulging with their contents. Below the bush jacket, she wore heavy bush pants tucked into the tops of short boots. A gunbelt and sidearm were hooked tightly about her narrow waist, the black holster holding the sidearm with its weather flap clipped firmly down
She wore nothing on her head. Her black hair was cut short about her ears, and her face was narrow and perfect below a wide brow and brilliant, dark eyes. In that single, arrested moment, the repressed poet in Hal woke, and he thought that she was like the dark blade of a sword in the sunlight. Then his attention was jerked from her. In a series of flashing motions the disassembled parts of the cone rifle in the hands of the gray-haired man were thrown back together, ending with the hard slap of a new tube of cones into the magazine slot below the barrel. The man was almost as swift as Hal had seen Malachi be in similar demonstrations. The movements of this man did not have the smooth, unitary flow of Malachi's - but he was almost as fast.
"All right," said the woman in the bush jacket. "It's Hilary."
The hands of the gray-haired man relaxed on the now-ready weapon; but the weapon itself still lay on the cloth over his knees, pointing in the general direction of Hal and the other two. Hilary got out of the van. Jason and Hal did the same.
"I brought you a couple of recruits," said Hilary, as coolly as if the man on the rock was holding a stick of candy. He started to walk forward and Jason moved after him. Hal followed.
"This is Jason Rowe," said Hilary. "Maybe you know him. The other's not of the faith, but a friend. He's Howard Immanuelson, a miner from Coby."
By the time he had finished saying this he was within a meter and a half of the woman and the man with Jason and Hal a step behind. Hilary stopped. The woman glanced at Jason, nodded briefly, then turned her brilliant gaze on Hal.
"Immanuelson?" she said. "I'm Rukh Tamani. This is my sergeant, James Child-of-God."
Hal found it hard to look away from her, but he turned his gaze on the face of the gray-haired man. He found himself looking into a rectangular, raw-boned set of features, clothed in skin gone leathery some years since from sun and weather. Lines radiated from the corners of the eyes of James Child-of-God; deeper lines had carved themselves in long curves about the corners of his mouth, from nose to chin, and the pale blue eyes he fastened on Hal were like the muzzles of cone rifles.
"If not of the faith," he said to them all now, in a dry, penetrating tenor voice, "he hath no right here among us."