Rukh stood facing them. She could not speak to them with the noise they were making. She could not even have spoken to them if they had stopped making it. The closest were twenty meters from her; and a few of them would have come equipped with repeaters to pick up her words and rebroadcast them to those further back. But she slowly raised both her arms, stretched at full length before her, until they were at shoulder level, and then slowly she spread them wide, as if blessing them all.
With the lifting of her arms, their voices began to die and by the time she had finished sweeping them wide, there was no sound at all to be heard from that vast gathering before her. In the new quiet, she turned about to face the other side of the roadstead; and repeated the gesture there, bringing these, too, into silence.
In that silence, she turned back toward the car and Hal moved quickly to catch her as she almost staggered once more, leaning heavily against him. He helped her back and half-lifted her into the vehicle, following close behind her.
With the closing of the door after them, and the starting up once more of the vehicles of the convoy, the voices broke out again; and that thunder beat steadily upon them, now, following them as they moved down the road past those who had not yet seen them up close, until they passed through the entrance in the high fence, past the unusually heavy perimeter guard of the spacepad in their trim blue uniforms and heavy power rifles, and went on into the relative emptiness of the pad, heading not for the terminal but for the shuttle itself, better than four kilometers distant across the endless gray surface of the pad.
Hal leaned forward and spoke to Jarir through the openness where the window between the compartments remained rolled down.
"You'll have to take my word for this," he said. "It's something I just noticed. A protective shield we've been planning to put around all of the Earth at low orbit level's just been set in place. The world is going to be hearing all about it in a few hours. But for now, if we don't get Rukh aboard that shuttle, and it off the ground in minutes, its pilots may find themselves ordered by the Atmosphere and Space authorities not to lift."
Jarir's eyes met his from a distance of only inches away, and held for a long moment. They had gone back to being bright stones again.
"She will be aboard," he said. "And it will lift."
Chapter Sixty-four
As Roget had predicted to them all in their pre-dawn session in the hotel, by the time the shuttle entered a bay at the Final Encyclopedia, Rukh was exhausted and sleeping heavily. Hal carried her off in his arms into the clanging noise and brightness of the bay and handed her over to two of the people from the Encyclopedia's medical clinic, who had brought a float stretcher. Almost beside him, the Number One pilot of the shuttle was close to shouting at the bay commander.
"I tell you I got word from the surface to turn around, to head back!" he was saying, "and I talked them out of it! I was the one who told them if they let me go on, I could get some answers up here. We could see it plain as day, coming in at this altitude - like a gray wall above us, stretching everywhere, out of sight. If it isn't all around the world and it isn't the same thing you've got around the Encyclopedia, I'll eat it - "
"Pilot, I tell you," said the bay commander, a small, black-haired woman in her thirties with a quiet, oriental face, "everything's on emergency status here at the moment. If you want to wait, I'll try to get someone down from the Director's staff to talk to you. But I can't promise when anyone'll come - "
"That's not good enough!" The pilot's voice lifted. He was a large, heavy man and he loomed over the commander. "I'm asking you for an answer in the name of the Space and Atmosphere Agency - "
Hal tapped the man on the shoulder, and the pilot pivoted swiftly, then stopped and stared upward as he found himself facing Hal's jacket collar tab.
"There'll be broadcasts from here explaining this to the whole world, shortly," Hal said. "There's nothing you can be told now that you and your superiors won't be hearing in a few hours, anyway."
The pilot found his voice again.
"Who're you? One of the passengers, aren't you? That's no good. I want someone who knows what's going on, and I want whoever that is, now!" He swung back to the bay commander. "I'm ordering you, if necessary, to get someone here in five minutes - "
"Pilot," said the bay commander, wearily, "let's be sensible. You've got no authority to order anyone here. Neither has Space and Atmosphere, or anyone else from below."
Hal turned away, his leaving ignored by the pilot. With Jason close behind, he headed toward Tam's suite, pushing his way gently through the turmoil and confusion he encountered along the way.
As he stepped through the door of the suite he found a broadcast of the sort he had promised the pilot already underway. The room was crowded. Not only were Amid and Nonne there, as well as the head of every department in the Encyclopedia except Jeamus, but there were at least half a dozen technicians, apparently concerned with the technical details of the broadcast.
It was Tam who was speaking. A desk float had been moved into position in front of his favorite non-float armchair and he looked across the unyielding gleam of the oak-colored surface as he spoke. Ajela stood to one side, behind him, just out of picture range. Her head turned to the door as Hal and Jason entered; and when she saw who it was she smiled at them. A smile, it seemed to Hal, of strong relief.
He went quietly to her along one wall of the room. It was neither a quick nor a steady journey. Everyone else in the room, it seemed, was utterly caught up in what Tam was saying in his deep and age-hoarsened voice. Hal would move a step or two, find his way blocked, and whisper in the ear of whoever was in the way. Whoever it was would turn, start, smile at him a little strangely, then move aside with a matching whisper of apology.
"… times without precedent sometimes require actions without precedent," Tam was saying to the picture receptors - and the whole Earth beyond.
"… And because we have access here at the Encyclopedia to equipment that does not, to my knowledge, exist anywhere else, I've been forced to make an emergency decision on the basis of information which we'll shortly be making available to all of you; but on which I felt I had to act at once.
"In brief, that information is that Earth is in danger of being attacked without warning and finding itself stripped of its historic freedom as an independent and autonomous world. My decision was that an impregnable barrier should be placed in position without further delay around our Mother World to make sure this could not happen.
"Accordingly, I gave an order which has since been carried out by personnel of the Encyclopedia; that a phase shield-wall, similar to the one that's preserved the independence of this Encyclopedia itself for more than eighty years, be placed completely about our planet, to lock out any possibility of armed attack from other human worlds.
"This phase shield-wall, as it's now configured, has been structured with all the necessary irises - or openings to outer space - that may be needed by space shipping to enter or leave the territory of Earth's space and atmosphere. These irises can be closed at will; and they will be, at a moment's notice, in the case of any threat against us. Once they are closed, nothing in the universe can penetrate to us without our permission.