"The boy won't," said Bleys.
"Boy?"
"The ward these three were raising and tutoring."
Dahno snorted faintly.
"You're worried about a boy?" he said.
"I thought you were the one who talked about neatness, Dahno. The old men died before they could tell us about him."
Dahno brushed the air again - a little impatiently. Hal watched him, standing in darkness outside the swath of light from the window.
"Why would the dogs think to keep them alive?"
"Because I didn't tell them to kill." Bleys' voice did not seem to have been raised, but it came with peculiar clearness to Hal's ears through the glass. Dahno cocked his head to look at the slim man, his face for a moment not cheerful, but merely watching.
"Aside from that," he said, his own voice unchanged, "what could they tell us?"
"More." Bleys' voice was again as it had been earlier. "Didn't you look at the prospectus on holding our Conference here? This place was set up under a trust established from the sale of an unregistered interstellar courier-class ship, which was found drifting near Earth, with the boy in it as a two-year-old child, or younger. No one else was aboard. I don't like mysteries."
"It's all that Exotic blood in you that doesn't like mysteries," Dahno said. "Where would we be if we took the time to try to understand every mystery we came across? Our game is controlling the machinery, not understanding it. Tell me about another way a few thousand of us can hope to run fourteen worlds."
"You could be right," said Bleys. "But still it's a careless attitude."
"Bleys, my buck," said Dahno. His voice changed only as slightly as Ahrens' had a moment before, but his eyes reflected the red light of the fire. "I'm never careless. You know that."
The night breeze freshened off the lake and a sudden small gust sent the branches of a lilac bush lashing against the pane of another of the library windows. Both of the men inside looked toward the sound at once. Hal stepped back noiselessly from the window, deeper into the shadow.
His training was urging him away, now. It was time to go. He half-swung toward the terrace, still not forming clearly in his mind the true picture of what was there, but with the empty feeling that what he was leaving was something to which he would never have a chance to return. But his training had anticipated that feeling also, and overrode it. He turned away from terrace and house alike, and moved off through the surrounding trees at a silent trot.
There were gravel-bed roads in the area for the traffic of air-cushion vehicles, but the way he took avoided them. He ran steadily, easily, through the pine scented night air of the forest, his footsteps silent on the dead conifer needles underfoot and making only little more sound on the patches of bare rock and hard earth. His pace was a steady twelve kilometers an hour, and in a little less than an hour and a half, he reached the small commercial center known as Thirkel. There were a dozen other such centers and two small towns that he could have reached in less distance and time; but an unconscious calculation from his training had led him to choose Thirkel.
Thanks to that calculation, at Thirkel he had only a fourteen minute wait before a regularly scheduled autobus stopped on its way into Bozeman, Montana. He was the only passenger boarding in the soft mountain night. He stepped aboard and displayed one of the credit tabs he now carried to the automatic control unit of the bus. The unit noted the charge for his travel, closed the doors behind him with a soft breath of air, and lifted the vehicle into the air again.
He came into Bozeman shortly after midnight and caught a shuttle to Salt Lake Pad. Then, as the early dawn was pinkening the sky beyond the surrounding mountains, he lifted in an orbital jitney on its run from that Pad to the gray-clad globe that was the Final Encyclopedia, swimming in orbit around Earth at sixteen hundred kilometers from its surface.
The jitney carried no more than fifty or sixty passengers - all of them having passed pre-clearance at the Earth end of the trip. Among Hal's papers had been a continually-renewed scholar's passport for a single visit, under his own name. Earth, the Dorsai, Mara and Kultis were the only four worlds where the Others had not yet gotten control of the internal government. But on Earth, only the records of the Final Encyclopedia could be regarded as secure from prying by the Others; and so all credit and record transactions Hal had made since leaving his home had been achieved with papers or tabs bearing the name of Alan Semple. These he now destroyed, as the jitney lifted, and he was left carrying nothing to connect him with the false name he had temporarily used. The automated records at the Final Encyclopedia would be too well informed for him to hope to use a false name; but, in them, his real name would be safe.
Twelve hundred kilometers out from Earth's surface the jitney began its approach to the Final Encyclopedia. On the screen of his seat compartment Hal saw it first as a silver crescent, expanding as they moved out of Earth's shadow, to a small silver globe of reflected sunlight. But as they came closer, the small globe grew inexorably and the great size of the Encyclopedia began to show itself.
It was not just its size, however, that held Hal fixed in his seat, his attention captured by the screen as the massive sphere on it swelled and swelled. Unlike the other passengers aboard this jitney, he had been trained by Walter to a special respect for what the Encyclopedia promised. He had gazed at it countless times on screens like this one, but never when he himself was about to set foot in it.
The jitney was slowing now, matching velocities as it approached the sphere. Now that they were closer, Hal could see its surface looking as if it were shrouded in thick gray fog. This would be a result of the protective force-panels that interlocked around the Encyclopedia - a derivation of the phase-shift that had opened up faster-than-light communication and transportation between the worlds, four hundred years before. The force-panels were a discovery, and a closely guarded secret, of those on the Encyclopedia. It had been these which had given the structure the silvery appearance from a distance - as the gray mist of dawn close above the water of a lake seems silvered by the early light of day.
Within those panels, the Encyclopedia was invulnerable to any physical attack. Only at points where the panels joined were there soft spots that had to be conventionally armored; and it was to one of these soft spots the jitney was now headed to find a port in which to discharge its passengers.
Hidden within the shield provided by those panels, was the physical shape of the Encyclopedia: a structure of metal and magic - the metal from the veins of Earth and the magic of that same force that made possible the phase drive and the panels - so that there was no way for anyone to tell from observation alone what was material and what was force-panel about the corridors and rooms that made up the Encyclopedia's interior. People within that structure did not move about as much as they were moved. The room they were occupying, on proper command, would become next door to the room to which they wished to go. Yet, also if they wished, there were distances of seemingly solid corridors to traverse and solid doors to open on places within the structure…
Metal and magic… as a boy Hal Mayne had been led to an awe of the Encyclopedia, from as far back as he could remember. For the moment now, that awe reinforced the wall protecting him from what he might otherwise remember from only a few hours before. He remembered how it had been an Earthman, Mark Torre, who had conceived the Encyclopedia. But Mark Torre, and even Earth would never have managed to get it built on its own. A hundred and thirty years had been required to bring it to completion, and all the great wealth that the two rich Exotic Worlds of Mara and Kultis could spare for its construction. Its beginnings had been put together on the ground, just within the Exotic Enclave at the city of St. Louis, in North America. A hundred and two years later, the half-finished structure had been lifted into its first orbital position only two hundred and fifty kilometers above the Earth. Twelve years after that, the last of the work on it had been finished, and it had been placed here, in its final orbit.