Night Walk

ten

Tallon passed through the line of pylons at dusk.

He guessed the declination of the rifles would be limited to the edge of the swamp and beyond, but he stayed beneath the screen anyway, and the crawling feeling between his shoulder blades remained there until he had safely crossed the line. His first action on the other side was to cut away the plastic envelope, wrap it inside the leaves, and hide the bundle in a clump of prickly shrub. Working quickly, he took Ariadne II out of her cage, tied her leg to the epaulette of his prison uniform, and climbed the palisade that kept the general public from straying into the rattlers’ domain.

The exhilaration of freedom, of walking like a human being on firm ground again, sustained Tallon as he moved diagonally over the rocky foothills marking the beginning of a mountain chain that straggled the whole length of the continent. When he had gained a little height he saw the trembling, varicolored lights of a small town clustered in the curve of a bay about five miles distant. The awesome planetary ocean stretched blackly away to the west, pricked here and there by the navigation lights of trawlers. He breathed deeply, savoring his release from the Pavilion, as well as the release from all pressures of human identity — a feeling one gets when nobody in the whole universe knows where he is or even if he exists.

At that moment the journey Tallon was about to attempt seemed absurdly easy. This, had he lived, would have been Winfield’s hour of triumph, Tallon knew. But the doctor was dead, and dead again.

Suddenly Tallon was tired and hungry and aware that he stank. There were no lights visible between him and the town — the ground appeared too rough for any sort of farming — so he headed down again to the water’s edge. On the way he searched in Winfield’s pack and found, in addition to the green guards’ uniforms, a flashlight, soap, and depilatory cream. There were also several bars of candy — more reminders of the old doctor’s years of patient work toward a day he was never going to see.

Standing on the pebbles of the narrow beach, Tallon stripped and washed in the cold sea. Keeping only his boots, he put on the fresh clothing and was relieved to find that one of the stretch-fabric uniforms fit him well enough. He tied the unprotesting bird to one shoulder, slung the pack over the other, and began walking north.

At first it seemed a good idea to stick to the beach in preference to the rock-strewn hillside, but as he walked it became obvious that there was no real beach. Mostly there was just a tiny strip of rough pebbles, and in many places tough grasses grew right to the water’s edge. After he’d been stumbling along the uneven stones for a while Tallon remembered he was not going to find any stretches of smooth sand. Emm Luther had no moon, which meant it had practically no tides, and therefore no beaches and no sand.

If only there were a moon, darling, we could have a moonlit picnic on the beach , he thought, if only there were a beach.

Munching the candy, he moved a little farther inland, with the intention of walking until he was perhaps half a mile from the town, and then trying to get some rest; but an unexpected occurrence forced him to change his plans. Ariadne II went to sleep. Tallon flicked the bird with his finger a few times, and she opened her eyes for a couple of seconds, but closed them again, plunging him into darkness. He felt annoyed, but this soon passed when he considered what she had been through on his behalf. In all probability any Earthside species of bird would have died from over-adrenalation long before this.

He lay down and tried to sleep. Although he was almost as far south as it was possible to go on Emm Luther and still remain on dry land, winter was just beginning to blend into spring and the night was cold. A long time went by before he achieved unconsciousness, and then he had dreams — of talking to Winfield, of dancing with Helen Juste, of flying up and up into the coppery light of dawn with the long-shadowed land falling away below. This last was very vivid. There was a tiny figure of a man in a dark green uniform lying down there on the grass. Tallon moved, clutching frantically for support.

He was flying!

Horizons of sea and land rotated sickeningly, and there was nothing under him but air.

His fingers sank into wiry grass. He became aware of the pressure of the hard ground against his back, and came fully awake. The visions of wheeling land and sea persisted, but now he knew what was causing them. Ariadne II had worked herself free and had escaped while she had the chance. The pictures grayed out as she passed beyond the range of the eyeset.

Her loss presented him with another problem — finding new eyes and using them to get hold of some food. He had to get something solid to eat in a hurry. The candy had given his blood sugar a temporary boost, but the overstimulatjon of the pancreas, which always accompanies the intake of neat carbohydrate, had flooded his system with sugar~amnihilating insulin. The result was that his blood sugar had dropped even farther below the fasting level, and now he could hardly stand without his knees buckling. He wished the doctor had thought enough about the nutrition problems of a blind man on the run to have included milk solids or some other convenient form of protein in the escape kit. But that was not getting him any closer to the space terminal at New Wittenburg.

Tallon put the eyeset on “search and hold” and picked up seabirds cruising over the water near the shore. He got more aerial views of the ocean dressed in its early morning grays, the tousled hillside, and his own dark green figure. This was good enough to let him continue walking north. It was still very early in the morning, and he reached the outskirts of the town just as the place was coming awake. He was able to switch to the eyes of men driving to work at dawn. None of them seemed to pay attention to him.

For a while Tallon was content to walk free along the quiet thoroughfares, marveling at how Earth-like his surroundings were. The big northern city of Testament, where he had spent most of his time while on Emm Luther, had a character of its own that was unlike anything on Earth; but small towns were small towns no matter where you went in the galaxy. The neat bungalows, sleeping in the morning stillness, were the same as those he had seen on half a dozen worlds; and the children’s tricycles, lying on the front lawns, were painted red, because human children the galaxy over liked them that way.

Why should a man choose one planet and say, this one I will put above all others? If be survived the psychic disembowelment of the flicker-transits and arrived on yet another miraculous green orb, why shouldn’t that be enough? Why carry with him the paraphernalia of political allegiances, doctrinal conflicts, imperialism, the Block? And yet Winfield had been blown to bits, and Sam Tallon was still carrying the location of a brand-new planet embedded in his brain.

He found a diner and spent a tenth of his money on a huge platter of fish steaks and sea greens, which he washed down with four cups of coffee. Neither the elderly waitress who served him, nor the one other customer — whose eyes Tallon was using — glanced at him twice. He reckoned he could have been taken for anything from a TV repairman to an employee of an obscure section of the local utilities complex.

Out in the street again he bought a pack of cigarettes from a vendor and walked along casually, smoking, pretending to look into store windows any time he lost sight of himself. More people were about, and he found it relatively easy to skip to fresh eyes and spot himself quickly from the new viewpoint. He discovered that very few people had perfect eyesight. The eyes he borrowed as he crossed the town were often nearsighted or farsighted, astigmatic or color blind, and he was mildly surprised to find that the people with the most defective vision were often the ones who did not wear glasses.

Many of the large downtown buildings were fronted with 3-D screens displaying shifting color patterns keyed to the tonal patterns of current music. There was no advertising, but a video newscast was put on every fifteen minutes or so. Tallon was too concerned with the second-by-second problems of negotiating crowds and crossing streets to pay much attention to the news, but his attention was suddenly gripped by a huge picture of a dovelike bird perched on a man’s finger. A piece of string dangled from one of its legs. Tallon was sure it was Ariadne II. He strained to hear the commentary.

… arrived back at the Government Detention Center early this morning. It is believed the two sightless detainees were carrying the bird with them, and its return is another indication thai they perished in the swamp. Earlier reports that the two men had obtained radarlike devices to take the place of normal eyes have since been denied by a spokesman for the Center.

And now, passing from the local scene to the galactic situation, the Moderator’s delegates to the prematurely ended- top-level conference on Akkab will arrive at the New Wittenburg space terminal this afternoon. It is understood …

Tallon moved on, frowning. It was good to know that he was presumed dead and therefore wouldn’t be hunted, but the newscast had stirred up in his mind the mystery of Helen Juste. Was she in trouble with the prison board for her unorthodoxy? Had she seen the trouble coming and tried to avoid it by ordering the confiscation of the eyesets? Why had she let them go so far in the first place?

A sign attached to the façade of the central post office confirmed Tallon’s guess that he was in the town of Sirocco. His hazy memory of Lutheran geography told him that Sirocco was on the continuous railway that circled the whole continent, performing the function of air services on other worlds. Winfield’s plan had been to travel at night and on foot, which had been reasonable enough, considering the limitations of the sonar torch; but Tallon could actually see. And apart from what appeared to be a rather heavy pair of spectacles, he looked much like any other citizen of Emm Luther. If he took the train he could be back in New Wittenburg in little more than a day. Once there, he would be faced with the difficulty of making contact with an agent, but it would be better to face the problem sooner than later. The alternative to the train was to start walking and run all the risks of having to live by stealing food, sleeping in sheds and barns, and in general acting in a highly suspicious manner. He decided to take the train.

As he walked he passed the time by practicing lip reading, an ability taught by the Block, and one for which he had never found much practical use. The recurring close-ups of faces of persons talking without the accompanying sound effects presented a challenge to Tallon. He wanted to find out what they were saying.

Tallon had often heard of the continuous railway, and in his cover job as an agent for Earth-made drafting systems he had even used it for shipping goods, but he had never seen it.

Arriving at the station, be saw a slow-moving line of carriages going by the long single platform and assumed he had got there just as a train was moving off or stopping. The railway operated on a universal fare system, so there were no formalities over tickets. A machine proyided him with a simple square of plastic entitling him to travel anywhere on the southern section for one day. He worked through knots of people and piles of freight onto the platform and stood waiting for the quietly drifting carriages to either speed up or finally come to a halt. Five minutes passed before he realized that neither of these things was going to happen; the railway really was continuous!

Tallon flicked the eyeset controls several times until he picked up a better view of the station and the system. The composite picture he built up showed an endless line of freight and passenger cars curving into the station from the east and vanishing to the north. None of the cars had an engine or any visible controls, yet they were moving quickly beyond the station and slowing down to about three miles an hour as they came alongside the platform. This puzzled him, till he saw that what be had taken to be a third rail was, in fact, a rotating screw mounted centrally between the wheel-bearing rails. It was then be began to appreciate the beauty of the system.

The cars needed no engines because their power came from the central screw, which was turned at a constant speed by small magnetic motors spaced about every half mile. Each car was attached to what amounted to an ordinary nut, which was pulled along by the action of the spinning screw. The cars needed no controls because their forward speed was governed by a device whose simplicity pleased the engineer in Tallon: where they approached the station, the pitch of the threads on the central screw was greatly reduced. This had the effect of automatically slowing them down to walking pace.

Momentarily bemused by his admiration for Emm Luther’s practical engineering, Tallon blended with a group of teen-age students who were waiting for the next passenger car to come by. He was looking through the eyes of a station official standing behind the group. As the car came close he moved toward it with the chattering students, then discovered he had overlooked an important feature of the continuous railway. The edge of the platform was a slideway moving at the same speed as the train, to let people get on and off safely.

Tallon’s right foot moved out from under him as he surged forward with the students, and he lurched sideways, completely off balance. There were startled protests as he grabbed for support and then fell awkwardly into the carriage, hitting the side of his head on the door frame.

Apologizing profusely, he dropped into an empty seat, hoping he had not been so conspicuous as to make anyone look closely at him. His right ear was throbbing hotly, but the pain was a secondary consideration. The blow from the door post had fallen directly on the part of the eyeset’s frame that concealed the miniature power pack, and Tallon thought he had experienced a brief grayout at the moment of impact. He was still receiving vision from the station official back on the platform, so he reselected on proximity, and got one of the students who had sat down on the opposite side of the compartment. After a moment Tallon relaxed; the eyeset seemed to be undamaged, and the other passengers apparently had forgotten his spectacular entrance.

The carriage gradually gathered speed until it was doing a smooth forty miles an hour in almost complete silence. The route northward kept close to the ocean. Occasionally the mountains on the other side receded to a distance of up to ten miles, but usually they were crowding in, limiting the living space, creating the pressures that were being felt back on Earth. The ribbon of flatland was a continuous suburban development, with commercial centers every few miles. A break in the continental spine became visible after half an hour, and another similiar train, going in the opposite direction, slid into place beside the one on which Tallon was traveling. He saw that at top speed the few feet of space that separated the cars at a station multiplied in the same ratio as the cars’ speed, so that they were quite widely strung out.

The students got out at one of the urban ganglia, but there was a continuous supply of other passengers to keep him provided with borrowed eyes. He noticed the women were more attractively dressed and more sophisticated than was usual in the colder north where the austere influence of Reformation, the governmental seat, was stronger. Some of the girls were wearing the new visi-perfumes, which surrounded them in pastel-tinted clouds of fragrance.

Once he used the eyes of a young woman who, judging by the way Tallon kept seeing himself in the center of his field of vision, was showing some interest in him. He flicked to another pair of eyes a few seats away and got a look at the woman. After noting that she had a bronzed, blond attractiveness Tallon, with the comfortable feeling of successful cheating, went back to her eyes to find out just how much she was interested by the number of times she looked at him.

Soothed by the movement of the carriage, the sun-lit warmth, the very presence of women, Tallon felt the first stirrings of sexuality that he had experienced in a long, long time. How good it would be, he thought drowsily, to be living normally again, to be swimming with the warm currents of life, to have a woman with red hair and whiskey-colored eyes… .

Tallon turned off his eyeset, and slept. He awoke to the persistent chiming of the public address system, and switched on the eyeset again. A man’s voice announced that the carriage was about to reach the city of Sweetwell, the northernmost point of the section, and would then be swinging to the east. Any passengers who wished to continue traveling north would have to get off and cross the Vajda Strait on the ferry. They would be able to board the central section train on the other side.

Tallon had forgotten that the bottom of the continent was separated from the rest by a narrow incursion of the sea. He began to swear silently, and was immediately astonished at the change in his attitude a few hours of comfort and safety had brought about. Last night he had been prepared to crawl to New Wittenburg on his hands and knees if necessary; today he was annoyed at having to change trains on the journey.

He stretched, and seeing himself perform the familiar action, realized that the blond girl was still opposite him and still showing interest. He turned his face until he seemed to be looking directly into his own eyes and smiled his best smile. The picture of himself looking pale and haggard, perhaps romantically so, remained for a few seconds before the girl’s gaze slid away to the passing buildings outside the train. He guessed she had smiled back at him for a moment, and he was warmed.

Tallon stood up as the platform came alongside; the man nearest the compartment door slid it open. The girl rose at the same time, and he knew she was smiling at him again. Outside, the platform was drifting by, and it was now imperative for Tallon to get off without falling. He had automatically motioned the girl to go ahead of him, then remembered that if she did he would be out of her field of vision.

“Sorry, miss,” he muttered regretfully, and elbowed past her to the door. She gasped, but his sudden rudeness had the useful effect of fixing her gaze firmly on his back. He got down onto the slideway and stepped safely on to the stationary platform. The girl continued to shoot angry glances at him when she was off the train, and until she was out of range he used her attention to guide him to the waiting ferry. It was about noon and the day was brilliantly clear. He was hungry again and decided to treat himself to a huge meal on the far side of the Strait, regardless of the cost. At his present rate of progress his money would be more than adequate.

The ferry turned out to be a primitive but fast ground effect machine, capable of crossing the mile-wide Strait in a couple of minutes. Tallon found the short trip exhilarating. The characteristic yawing ride of the hovercraft, the roar of the turbines, white spray flying on each side, the jostling of the other travelers in the stand-up passenger saloon — all combined to produce a cheerful vacation mood. The vessel waltzed up its ramp and into the dock. Tallon strolled through the group of people waiting to embark, and began looking for a good restaurant. There was a diner attached to the rail terminal complex, but it looked slightly squalid, and he had no doubt it would charge high prices for indifferent food.

He walked up sloping streets toward the center of city still enjoying the sense of freedom. Sweetwell was a bustling city with a suggestion of provincial France in its sophisticated little stores and sidewalk cafes. He would have enjoyed eating in the sunlight, but decided not to throw away all caution — his picture was bound to have been included in the newscasts and there was always the chance that somebody might look too closely at him and start wondering. Accordingly he picked a quiet restaurant, with a Gothic sign identifying it as The Persian Cat.

The only other customers were two pairs of middle-aged women sipping coffee and smoking, with shopping bags on the floor at their feet. Tallon flicked the eyeset, got behind the eyes of one of the women, and saw himself walk in and sit down at a vacant table. The tables were of real wood and were covered with what seemed to be genuine linen. Two large gray cats padded about among the chair legs. Tallon, who was not a cat enthusiast, shifted uneasily and wished one of the other customers would look at a menu.

The food, when he finally got it, was quite good. The steak had been processed so well that Tallon could not detect the taste of fish at all, and he guessed it would cost him plenty. He ate quickly, suddenly impatient to be back on the train, gulped the coffee, and reached for his money.

His wallet was gone.

Tallon searched his other pockets mechanically, knowing all the while that his wallet had been stolen, probably during the jostling ride across the Strait. The ferry was an obvious hunting ground for pickpockets, and Tallon swore at his own carelessness. The situation was serious, for he was now in trouble with the restaurant and could not buy a train ticket later.

Toying with the dregs of his coffee, Tallon decided that if he was going to start stealing money The Persian Cat was as good a place as any to do it. It seemed to have only one afternoon waitress, who spent long periods out in the kitchen, leaving the cash desk near the door unattended. It was a foolishly trusting thing to do, he thought; almost as foolish as not holding on to your wallet in a crowd.

Two of the middle-aged shoppers were still in the restaurant. Waiting for them to leave, Tallon motioned to one of the gray cats and lured it over to him. He lifted the heavy animal onto his lap, trying to tickle it behind the ears, and adjusted the eyeset to put him behind its great yellow eyes.

Tallon feared the other two customers were going to stay until somebody else came in and ruined his chance, but they finally gathered up the shopping and rang for their check. To Tallon’s surprise it was not the waitress who had served him who emerged from the screen at the rear; it was instead a tall brunette of about thirty, wearing black-rimmed glasses and an expensively tailored business suit. He decided she was either the manager or the owner.

One her way back from the cash desk the brunette stopped at his table. He raised the almost empty coffee cup to his lips.

“Can I get you anything more?”

Tallon shook his head. “Nothing, thanks. I’m enjoying your excellent coffee.”

“I see you like my cats.”

“Love them,” Tallon lied. “Beautiful creatures. This is a particularly fine cat. What’s his name?”

“His name is Ethel.”

Tallon smirked desperately, wondering if real cat lovers were supposed to be able to tell toms from tabbies at a glance. He concentrated on stroking Ethel’s head, and the brunette, after giving him a suspicious look, moved off toward the screen. The little encounter had filled Tallon with a sense of uneasiness, and he decided to waste no more time. He held the cat up and rotated it, making sure the restaurant was deserted, then walked quickly to the desk. The old-fashioned cash register was bound to make a noise when he operated it, so Tallon edged the door open slightly in preparation for a quick escape. He pressed a key on the register and feverishly scooped a handful of bills from the drawer.

“Detainee Samuel Tallon,” a woman’s voice said softly behind him.

Tallon spun, with the cat under his arm, and saw the expensively dressed brunette. Her eyes, behind the black-rimmed glasses, had a hard speculative glint in them. She was aiming a gold-plated automatic pistol squarely at his chest.