Night Walk

nine

For a second the blunted needle refused to penetrate; then it punctured the skin and slid deep into Tallon’s arm.

“Sorry, son,” Winfield said. “I’m out of practice.”

“Look, Doc, are you quite sure about all this? You made up a second escape kit so you could bring along somebody who could help you — not a blind man.” Tallon rolled his sleeve down over his faintly throbbing arm.

“Sure I’m sure. Besides, I’m giving you this eyeset as soon as we’re ready to move off.”

“Nothing doing, Doc. You keep the eyeset and I’ll stick with the sonar. I’m lucky to have that much, I suppose.” Tallon had fallen several times during the nightmarish journey from the cell block to the meeting place, but had hardly felt the pain. His brain was trying to find the reason why Helen Juste had confiscated his eyeset. Why had she encouraged them to complete the eyesets before she cracked down? Had she got wind of their escape plan and chosen this way of slamming the door?

“Well, that’s that,” Winfield announced. “I wanted us to have the general-purpose shots before we started walking. Even the woodworms can have a nasty bite in this part of the world.”

He pushed a bulky package into Tallon’s arms, and they made their way cautiously down the slope toward the palisade. The bird on Winfield’s shoulder clucked apprehensively as the doctor slid once on a patch of rank grass. Tallon kept the sonar torch aimed straight ahead and listened to the steadily rising tone caused by the beam hitting the palisade.

“Here we are,” the doctor grunted. His voice was followed by dull crunching sounds as he kicked out the rotten wood inhabited by his carefully nurtured colony of worms. Tallon followed him through the hole, grimacing as an accidental contact with the edge showered him with thousands of tiny writhing creatures. They traveled a short distance toward the swamp until they ran out of hard ground.

“Suits now,” Winfield said brusquely. “Did you remember not to eat or drink?”

“Yes.”

“Good, but you’d better have this anyway.”

“What is it?”

“Diaper.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You’ll thank me for it later.”

With Winfield doing most of the work, they draped the plastic sheets around their necks and sealed the edges. It was difficult to handle anything properly through the plastic, but Winfield produced a roll of adhesive tape and bound it at their necks, wrists and ankles. The binding made it possible for them to walk and move their arms with comparative freedom. To complete the grotesque outfits, they wrapped more plastic around their heads, finished it with cement and tape, then jammed on their prison caps.

“I’ll carry the pack and the bird,” Winfield said. “Stay as close to me as you can.”

“You can count on that, Doc.”

Moving toward the swamp in blackness, Tallon was aghast at the thought of what he was going to do. Although blind, he knew when he had reached the edge of the swamp by the feel of the clammy mist closing round him, as well as by the stench, which made every breath something to be planned in advance and forced through with determination. Unidentifiable night noises drifted through the swirling vapor, reminding him that, although the robot rifles had finished off only the swamp’s warm-blooded inhabitants, there were others to share the darkness. And yet, Tallon was aware of feeling something approaching peace. He had finally become tired of drifting with the current, of compromising, of feeling afraid. The fat old doctor, with his head full of ridiculous dreams, was leading him to almost certain death; but he had taught Tallon one great truth: Walking toward death is not pleasant, but it’s better than having it come up fast behind you.

The swamp was much worse than Tallon had anticipated; in fact, he discovered he had not really expected the swamp to be a problem. They were able to remain upright and move ahead by walking and wading for the first hour, covering about two hundred yards in reasonable comfort. But presently Tallon began to hit patches where his feet seemed to sink through six inches of molasses before reaching solid support. The goo made walking difficult but not impossible, even when it had begun to reach nearly to his knees. Tallon went steadily ahead, sweating in his plastic sheet. Then the bottom seemed to drop out of the world. Instead of his feet finding bedrock, they kept going down and down as though the whole planet was sucking him through its skin.

“Fall forward,” Winfield shouted. “Throw yourself down on it and keep your arms spread out.”

Tallon splashed forward, spread-eagled on the heaving surface of the quagmire, embracing its filth. The water splashed over his face, and sediment swirled to the surface, releasing all the odors of death. Uncontrollable spasms of retching forced his face down again, into the crawling fluid.

“Are you all right, son?” Winfield’s voice was anxious.

Tallon’s first impulse was to shout for help in his black, blind universe, but he clenched his teeth and kept beating the surface of the quagmire with his arms. Gradually his feet worked upward, and he moved forward again in a semi-swimming motion.

“I’m all right, Doc. Keep traveling.”

“That’s the way. It won’t all be like this.”

Furious splashing sounds from up ahead told Tallon the doctor was already moving on. Grinning with desperation, Tallon flailed after him. Sometimes they would reach little islands where they were able to travel short distances on foot, beating their way through the rubbery vegetation. At other times they encountered solid curtains of vines and had to go to the side or even backtrack to get by them. Once Tallon put his hand squarely on something lying flat and icy smooth below the surface. It humped convulsively and drove out from under his body with silent strength, paralyzing him with fear.

As the night wore on Tallon found himself catching up to Winfield with increasing frequency, and he realized the doctor was reaching the point of exhaustion. Winfield’s breathing became a harsh, monotonous sobbing.

“Listen, Doc,” Tallon finally shouted. “We both need a rest. Is there any point in risking a heart attack?”

“Keep moving. There’s nothing wrong with my heart.”

Tallon found some firm ground under his feet. He lunged forward, throwing his weight onto Winfield, and brought him crashing down. The doctor fought him off stubbornly while struggling to move on.

“For Christ’s sake, Doc,” Tallon gasped, “I’m talking about my heart. Take it easy, will you?”

Winfield fought on for a moment, then went limp. “Okay, son,” he said between gasps. “I’ll give you five minutes.”

“Believe me, Doc, I’m grateful to you.”

“I’m grateful to myself.”

They lay huddled together, laughing weakly while Winfield’s breathing gradually returned to normal. Tallon told him of his encounter with the underwater creature.

“A slinker — harmless at this time of the year,” Winfield said. “In the laying season, though, the skin of the female toughens into knife edges at the sides. They slice past anything that moves, laying it open, and inject their eggs at the same time.”

“Nice habits.”

“Yes. I’m told the thing to do is to think of it not as losing a foot, but as gaining a batch of slinker offspring. As a matter of fact, we’re making this trip at a very good time. The swamp is pretty quiet late on in the winter. The only real danger is from muck spiders.”

“Poisonous?”

“No. With the sort of mouths they have, poison would be superfluous. They lie in shallow water, with their legs stuck up in the air like bullrushes, and there’s nothing in the middle but mouth. If you ever come through here again, son, avoid walking through any neat circular clumps of bullrushes.”

Tallon got an unpleasant idea. “What’s that bird’s night vision like? Are you getting a good enough picture to let you spot a muck spider?”

Winfield snorted. “What are you worrying about? Aren’t I going first?”

When daylight came to the swamp Winfield insisted on letting Tallon have a spell with the eyeset.

Tallon accepted, grateful for the release from blackness, and took the lead for several hours. He used a crude spear, which Winfield had made by snapping a thin sapling, to beat smaller vegetation out of his way. The bird fluttered occasionally in its plastic-covered cage, but showed no signs of any real discomfort. As he moved through slow-dripping foliage Tallon saw that the water was alive with dark brown leechlike creatures, writhing, twisting, continually warring on each other. Great streamers of their dark bodies trailed around his legs. The air hummed with the vibration of tiny gnats, or was parted by the heavy throb of huge sooty-black insects blundering through the swamp, intent on unknown missions.

Twice during the day, low-flying aircraft swept by directly overhead, but the ice-green mist hid them from view. Tallon’s mental processes slowed down while he labored mechanically, thinking river-bed thoughts, dreaming brown dreams. Their rest periods grew longer, and the intervals between them shorter, as fatigue spread through their bodies. At dusk they found a small knoll of almost dry ground and slept like children.

The robot rifles were more than capable of shooting clear across the four-mile reach of swamp, so their missiles were fitted with time fuses, which limited the range to two thousand yards. Their effective range, however, was governed by the density of the swamp mist. When it was at its thickest a man could get within four hundred yards of the pylons before his body heat reached the trigger threshold. But even in the murkiest periods, a sudden gust of wind could open a swirling avenue far into the swamp, the gleaming grasshopper legs of the servos would contract, and a heavy slug would howl its way down the misty tree lanes.

Winfield had thought a lot about the rattler rifles while he was planning his escape.

On the second morning in the swamp he opened his pack, took out a small knife, and split the plastic that covered Tallon’s hands and his own. They gathered armfuls of the thick, double-walled dringo leaves, dodging the whizzing leaps of the sheltering scorpions, and sewed them together to make heavy dark green blankets.

“We’ll soon be back on dry land,” Winfield said. “You can see the green stuff thinning out already. The mist is quite heavy this morning, so we’re all right for another few hundred yards; but after that keep your head down and stay under your screen. Got it?”

“Keep my head down and stay under my screen.”

The encumbrance of the heavy blanket of leaves made movement more difficult than ever. Tallon sweltered under the plastic as he struggled along behind the doctor, deprived of even the meager companionship of the sonar torch’s electronic voice in his ear. He had had to switch it off as soon as the screen was pulled over his head.

They inched their way forward for two hours before Tallon noticed that the going was getting easier. Gradually there was less backtracking to do, fewer floundering escapes from seemingly bottomless wells of slime. He began to think about the possibility of walking upright in fresh air, of being clean and dry, of eating again.

Suddenly, up ahead, Winfield gave a hoarse scream.

“Doc! What is it?” Tallon heard violent splashing sounds, and cursed his blind helplessness. “What’s wrong, Doc?”

“A spider. A big one… .” The doctor screamed again, and the splashing grew louder.

Tallon threw aside the burden of leaves and crept forward as quickly as he could, expecting at any moment to put his unprotected hand far down into a cold wet mouth.

“Where are you, Doc? Can you see me?”

“This way, son. That’s far enough. Hold out your left hand.”

Tallon did as he was told and felt something light and brittle drop into his fingers. It was the eyeset. He put it on and was jolted with green blurs of brilliant light. Winfield had dropped the birdcage, and Tallon found himself looking at an unearthly scene through the slime-streaked plastic. At first he did not recognize the mud-splattered starfish shape that was himself or the other writhing one that was Winfield.

The doctor was lying on his back, and his right leg was sunk up to the knee in a seething patch of turbulence. Red stains were spreading in the churning water, and around its perimeter eight jointed stalks whipped and quivered in the air. Moaning with dismay, Tallon oriented himself and lunged sideways for the spear, which had dropped clear of Winfield’s hand. He lifted it and drove the point down through the mud toward where he guessed the muck spider’s body to be. The surface of the water heaved sluggishly, and the spear twisted in his grasp.

“Hold on, Doc. I’m using the spear on it.”

“It won’t work that way. Skin too tough. Got — got to go down the throat. Give me the spear.”

Tallon hauled the spear back and guided it into Winfield’s blindly grasping hand. The doctor’s mouth gaped silently as he took the crude weapon and worked the point down into the water close to his leg. The green stalks clawed eagerly at his arms, then suddenly sprang upright.

“I’m getting there,” Winfield grunted. “I’m getting it.”

He grasped the spear higher up on its shaft and triumphantly began to go up it, hand over hand. The surface of the swamp all around him convulsed as his weight bore down on the vibrating spear. Tallon, crouched close by, was totally absorbed in the struggle when silent alarms began to sound in his head. Winfield was winning his battle, but there was another danger, something they were forgetting.

“Doc!” he shouted. ” You’re standing up!”

Winfield froze for an instant, looking guilty rather than afraid, and was dropping to the ground when the missile claimed him.

Tallon heard the incredible impact, the subway roar of the missile’s flight arriving in its wake, and he glimpsed the doctor’s headless body cartwheeling away over the water. Seconds later came the tardy, rolling echoes of the rifle shot. The spear still stood upright in the mud, rocking slightly with the movements of the unseen spider.

That was a stupid action, Tallon thought numbly; you weren’t supposed to stand up, Doc. You warned me not to stand up, and then you stood up. He crouched on his hands and knees for several seconds, shaking his head bewilderedly; then the anger returned, the same anger that had let him carry Cherkassky out through a hotel window into the thin air high above New Wittenburg.

Tallon wiped the slime off the plastic cover of the bird cage to give himself a better view of his own actions; then he crept to the spear. Ignoring the beating of the jointed green stalks, he pulled the spear up and drove it back down into the same spot again and again, until the water was whorled with cream-colored fluid. Pulling the spear up for the last time, he went in search of Winfield’s body. He found it in a shallow pool, already shrouded in a shimmering cloak of leeches.

“I’m sorry, Doc,” he said aloud, “but Earth expects you to do one more thing. And I know you would want to oblige.”

Tallon worked the tip of the spear into a fold in the plastic of the doctor’s suit, and groaning with the effort, levered the body into an upright position. He was much closer this time, and the impact of the second missile stunned his senses as the spear and its grisly burden were ripped from his fingers. Tallon collected the bird and the supply pack, then draped himself in the heavy screen of dringo leaves. He moved forward for another four hours before he risked making a tiny opening in the overlapping leaves and holding the bird cage close to it.

He had almost reached the northern edge of the swamp, and far ahead, with sunlight gleaming on its upper surfaces, the slim pylon of a rattler rifle soared up above the mists. Tallon had no way of knowing if he was looking at the rifle that had killed Logan Winfield, but somewhere along the line one of the sentient machines would be registering two missiles fired. To the Pavilion security force, two missiles fired would mean that two prisoners had terminated their sentences.

Beyond the slender pylon Tallon glimpsed the sloping gray uplands of the continent’s spinal ridge. He settled down, with the bird cage held tight in his arms, to wait for night and the start of the real journey.

There were still a thousand miles to New Wittenburg — and eighty thousand portals to Earth.