"Of course you are, Roget," she said.
Chapter Sixty-three
Dawn came up bright and hard on the waters of Lake Qattara, with a little chop to the waves and an on-shore breeze. With dawn came also a man in his fifties with a tanned, sharp-boned face and bright, opaque eyes, who wore his civilian suit like a uniform and was called Jarir al-Hariri. It appeared he was the equivalent of Police Commissioner for the large district surrounding the lake. With his coming the hotel began to swarm with activity. The instincts of Hal and Jason on entering the hotel had not lied to them. The great majority of guests who now appeared were plainly Earth-born and non-military; but their protective attitude toward Rukh was more like that of the members of her old Command on Harmony than that which might have been expected from casual converts to the message she had been preaching.
Hal himself was up before dawn. He had sat with Rukh until her breathing deepened into heavy slumber, then eased himself gently and with great slowness from the position in which he sat holding her. Detached, finally, he had laid her gently down in the bed and covered her up, leaving her to sleep.
Back in the room to which the clerk in the hotel led him after Amyth had called down to the lobby, he dropped onto his own bed; and slept heavily for nine hours - coming awake suddenly with a clear mind and drugged feel to his body that told him he was still far from normally rested. He rose, showered, ran his clothes through the room cleaner, and ate the breakfast he had ordered up to his room.
Then he went in search of Jason and Amyth, found them deep in consultation with Roget the physician over the problem of moving Rukh safely, and was himself drawn into the talk. But by nine in the morning, local time, the move was underway. They would go from the hotel to the spacepad outside Alexandria, some two hundred and seventy-three kilometers distant, by surface transportation. Medically, Roget had reservations about an air trip. These were slight, but existed nonetheless. There were, however, very strong security reasons for sticking to the ground. Any atmosphere craft could be vulnerable to destruction by a robot drone with an explosive warhead - something any wild-eyed fringe group could put together in an hour or so - given the materials - out of any number of industrial atmosphere-operating robots, doing the work in any handy back room or basement.
Spacepad security would destroy any such drone automatically at its perimeters, so there would be no worries once the spacepad was reached; and beyond the umbrella of that security any shuttle on its way to the Encyclopedia would be either too high or moving too swiftly for a drone to reach it.
Once in the Encyclopedia, of course, Rukh would be utterly safe.
"I take it," Hal had said to Jarir al-Hariri, early in this discussion, "security's been strict about letting the information spread beyond these walls that Rukh's leaving today?"
The stony, bright eyes had met his almost indifferently across the table at which they sat with cups of coffee - real Earth coffee, pleasant but strange now to Hal's taste buds.
"There has been no leak through my people," Jarir had said.
The pronunciation of the words in Basic were noticeably mangled on the Commissioner's tongue; surprising in the case of anyone speaking a language that had been the majority tongue of Earth, as well as that of the Younger Worlds for three hundred years; particularly when teaching methods had been in existence at least that long which made it possible for nearly everyone to learn any new language quickly, easily and without accent.
Jarir was evidently one of those rare linguistic exceptions who had trouble with any tongue he had not been born to. The Commissioner turned to Roget and spoke to him rapidly in what Hal recognized as Arabic. Hal did not speak that particular language himself, but he caught the word "Es-sha'b" which he identified by the Exotic cognate methods Walter the InTeacher had taught him, as meaning "people" in Arabic.
Roget answered with equal rapidity in the same language, then broke back to Basic, looking at Hal.
"I go in and out of this hotel all the time," he said. "None of those with Rukh have left it since you came in; and the hotel staff is as loyal to her as anyone else."
There was a casualness with which both of them seemed to dismiss the problem of necessary secrecy that disturbed Hal. No doubt what both had just said was true enough. Nonetheless, he had seen people beginning to congregate there at first light, outside the low white stone wall with its wide, low gates, that marked the limits of the hotel's grounds before its entrance.
Later, when their convoy of vehicles finally drove out through those same gates, the crowd assembled there was several hundred people in size, standing closely massed on both sides of the road. As the gates opened and the convoy of vehicles moved out, they waved - still silently, at the opaqued windows of the ambulance in the center of the convoy line. While their appearance was friendly, it was impossible that so many should have known to gather there unless there had been little or no attempt to keep word of the trip from them; and if Jarir's security was so lax in that respect, what did that promise for the other areas of possible danger they might encounter on their way to the Alexandria spacepad?
The waving hands were clearly directed at Rukh; but in fact, Rukh was not in the ambulance. She rode on the curved banquette seat of the rear compartment of one of the following police escort cars, seated between Hal and Roget, with Jason occupying the single facing seat. The transparent safety window between the rear and driving compartments was up and locked, additional and effective enough shield against any small arms fire short of that from power rifles or handguns - which were unlikely to be found outside the hands of the military or paramilitary here on Earth.
Through the window as the convoy left the hotel, Hal could see the countryside before them, framed between the backs of the heads of the police driver and Jarir. As they went through the gates, Jarir glanced back for a second at Rukh, and through the transparency, Hal saw the stony eyes go soft and dark. Only half a kilometer or so down the road the wayside was free of people watching and waving, and the convoy speeded up. Ahead, the roadstead was a wide strip of closely-growing dwarf grass, green as spring leaves between the low white siderails that warned off pedestrians. Hal could see even this short, thick grass flatten beneath the supporting air cushions of the vehicles as they picked up speed.
The green road ran in a long curve steadily toward the horizon, bordered on each side by open fields interspersed with the low transparent domes of hydroponic farms. Occasionally a few people were to be seen, standing waiting for the convoy to pass and waving as it did so.
"So much for security about Rukh's leaving the hotel," commented Hal.
"I can sympathize with those who leaked the word, though," said Jason. "Particularly after those news broadcasts last night."
"What news broadcasts?" Hal looked at him.
"You didn't - no, that's right, you went to bed early." Jason's face lit up. "You don't know, then!"
"That's right," said Hal, "I don't. Tell me."
"Why," Jason said, "evidently it took about ten hours for news about the assassination attempt to sink in around the world. Then some groups in a few of the major cities - you know, it's just like back home, here. The people outside the cities are all on our side. It's in the cities that they don't care - but as I started to tell you, some of these groups who'd picketed Rukh's talks and spoken and written against her came up with the idea of celebrating the fact that someone'd tried to kill her. And that triggered off the landslide."
"In what way?" demanded Hal.
"Why, it brought out all the people who'd heard her, and understood her, and had faith in her!" Jason's face was alight. "More people than anyone'd imagined - more people than we'd believed or imagined. News services came out with large stories on her side. Government bodies started to debate resolutions to protect people like her from other assassination tries like that. Hal - you actually hadn't heard about this until now? Isn't it unbelievable?"