Night Walk

twelve

Tallon was clearing the outskirts of the city when he heard the lonely clattering of a single helicopter. Its navigation lights drifted across the sky, high up in the predawn grayness. In a technology that had learned to negate gravity itself, the helicopter was a crude contraption, but it was still the most efficient vertical-takeoff machine ever devised, and it was unlikely to go out of use as long as some men had to run and others had to hunt them like eagles.

Holding Seymour’s head upright, Tallon watched the solitary light drift out of sight beyond the northern horizon. Amanda had wasted no time, he thought. Now that any glimmer of hope of not being reported to the police was gone he began looking for a safe place to wait out the coming day. He was walking on a second-class motorway, lined on one side with native trees and on the other with stunted palms grown in the higher gravity of Emm Luther from imported seeds. At that time of the morning traffic was limited to infrequent private automobiles, traveling fast, trailing turbulent wakes of dust and dried leaves.

Tallon kept close to the trees, hiding each time he saw headlights, and scanned the quiet buildings for a likely place to sleep. As he left Sweetwell behind, the neat garden factories were gradually replaced by small flat-blocks, and then by private houses in the higher income class. The tailored lawns shone in the light from the motorway. Several times as he walked, his view of his surroundings seemed to dim slightly, and he whispered fiercely to Seymour, urging the terrier to alertness. But in the end he had to admit to himself that the fault was in the eyeset. He fingered the tiny slide controlling the gain and was shocked to discover it was almost up against the end of its slot. It looked as though the damage he had done to the power unit was progressive in effect, in which case …

Tallon dismissed the thought and concentrated on finding a place to spend the day. Lights were beginning to appear in windows as he opened the door of a shrub-covered shed behind one of the larger dwellings. The darkness in the shed was filled with the nostalgic odor of dry earth, garden tools, and machine oil. Tallon settled down in a corner, with Seymour, and sorted out some of his new possessions. He had Amanda Weisner’s gold-plated automatic, enough food for several days, a roll of bills, and a radio. Later in the day as he lay in his private universe of blackness, with the eyeset switched off, he was able to pick up the first newcasts.

Detainee Samuel Tallon, he learned, was still alive and had reached the city of Sweetwell. Tallon, who had been convicted of spying for imperialist Earth, had forced his way into a Sweetwell restaurant, had assaulted and raped the proprietress, and had then vanished with most of her cash. It was now confirmed that, although blind, the escaped detainee was equipped with a radarlike device that enabled him to see. He was described as being armed and dangerous.

Tallon smiled wryly. The bit about rape was particularly good, coming from Amanda. He fell asleep and managed to doze most of the day, only coming fully awake when low growls from Seymour announced that people were moving around outside. Nobody came into the shed, and after a while Tallon stopped thinking about what he would do if they did. Winfield’s philosophy that a man had to do his best with the present and leave the future to itself was not especially attractive to Tallon, but it was the only one that worked in the present circumstances.

At dusk he gathered up Seymour and the pack and cautiously opened the door. As he was about to step out a large plum-colored limousine swept up the short driveway and rolled to a halt outside the main house. A thickly built young man got out, with his jacket slung over his arm, and waved to someone in the house who was beyond Tallon’s field of vision. The young man walked toward the front entrance, stopped at a bed of pale blue song-flowers, and knelt down to remove a weed. At his touch the flowers began a sweet, sad humming that was clearly audible in the dark confines of the shed.

The song-flowers were a native variety that fed on insects, using the plaintive humming sound to attract or lull their prey. Tallon had never liked them. He listened impassively for a moment, holding Seymour’s eye to the narrow opening of the door. The heavy-set man discovered several more weeds and uprooted them; then, muttering furiously, he came toward the shed. Tallon slipped the automatic out of his pocket, reversed it in his hand, and stood waiting as the crunching footsteps reached the other side of the door.

This was exactly the sort of thing he had hoped to avoid. His training was such that he could beat most any man in physical combat; but having his eyes tucked under one arm was going to make a big difference.

He tensed himself as the door latch moved.

“Gilbert,” a woman’s voice called from the house. “Change your clothes if you’re going to start gardening. You promised.”

The man hesitated for two or three seconds before turning and moving away toward the house. As soon as the man was inside the house Tallon slipped out of the shed and hit the road again.

He kept it up for four days, traveling a short distance by night and hiding out during daylight, but the deterioration in the eyeset’s performance was becoming more noticeable. By the end of the fourth night, the picture he was getting was so faint that he would almost have been better off with the sonar torch. His name had gradually faded from the newscasts, and so far he had not seen a single member of the E.L.S.P. or even of the civil police. He decided to begin traveling in daylight again.

Tallon walked for three more days, not daring to try hitching a ride. He now had plenty of money, but the risk of eating in restaurants or even at lunch counters seemed too great, so he lived on the bread and the protein preserves he’d taken from The Persian Cat, and by drinking water from the ornamental fountains along the way.

Seeing it from the point of view of a pedestrian, Tallon was aware, as never before, of Emm Luther’s desperate need for land. The density of population was not particularly high, but it was completely uniform — the residential developments, interspersed with commercial and industrial centers went on without end, filling every square mile of level land the continent had to offer. Only where uplands merged into actual, hostile mountainsides did the waves of neat, prefabricated buildings fall back in defeat. Some attempt was made at agriculture in the high borderland areas, but the planet’s real farming space was the ocean.

Tallon had covered almost one hundred miles before realizing that he was going to be able to see only poorly for perhaps two more days and would then be blind again — with 700 miles still to go.

The only faint ray of hope was that the Block would know he was out of the Pavilion. All members of the network would be on the lookout for him, but the organization had never been strong on Emm Luther. New Wittenburg was the planet’s only entrance point, and the E.L.S.P. automatically put tracers on every Earthsider who took up residence. It was quite possible that at that very moment good agents were being caught as they broke their covers in order to try to intercept Tallon. He decided to keep on the road for one more day and head for the railway again.

The next day passed without incident. Tallon was aware that none of the newscasts had given an adequate description of the eyeset, although Amanda must have been able to furnish one. He figured there was some kind of censorship at work, perhaps to avoid an official scandal over the fact that dangerous political prisoners had been given facilities to manufacture highly sophisticated artificial eyes. He sensed that Helen Juste might be in trouble; but the main thing, as far as Tallon was concerned, was that the general public had no idea what they were looking for. Anybody interested enough to look for someone using a “radarlike device” might reasonably expect to see a man with a black box and rotating antenna on his head. As it was, spectacles were a fairly common sight, never having been fully supplanted by contact lenses; and Tallon in his dusty, anonymous uniform blended into most backgrounds. His unremarkable appearance had been one of his major assets in the service of the Block.

The following day was slightly colder, and there was a little rain, the first Tallon had seen since his arrest. His route had never taken him far from the coastal railway system, and now he began walking toward the ocean again. The dullness of the day was magnified by the somber images produced in the failing eyeset, and TalIon hurried to make the most of the measured amount of light left to him. Late in the afternoon he caught a glimpse of the ocean, and shortly afterward saw the glint of railway tracks.

Slanting north again to where he guessed the next railway station to be, Tallon found himself approaching the first really big industrial development he had seen on his journey. Behind a high perimeter fence the sawtooth roofs of the factory receded into the gathering dusk for almost a mile before terminating in the banked glowing windows of a design and administration block. The roar of powerful air-conditioning machinery reached Tallon as he walked by the fence, puzzled at the contrast between this huge plant and the typical family business setup prevailing on Emm Luther. Several dark green trucks passed, slowing down to go through a lighted and patrolled entrance a hundred yards ahead, and Tallon glimpsed the book-and-star emblems that marked them as the property of the government.

Tallon now began to understand. The immense, noisy complex was one of the factors that had put him in his present situation. It was part of the chain of government factories that was draining the planet of its technological cream in a massive production program for interstellar probes.

Here were built parts for the fantastically expensive robot ships that were launched from Emm Luther at the rate of one every fifty-five seconds, year in, year out. More than half a million probes a year — as many as were produced by Earth itself — were triggered into open-ended jumps and the consequent lonely destinies of flicker-transits. The planet had bled itself white in the effort, but the gamble had paid off with a new world.

Now the factories were swinging over to the crash production of everything needed to make Aitch Muhlenberg a going concern before Earth found a foothold. The land area of the new world was still secret, but if Emm Luther could put in two settlers, with support material, for every square mile before any other power found its way there, then by interstellar law the whole planet would be hers. Ironically, the law had been promulgated mainly by Earth, but that had been in earlier days, when the mother world had not foreseen the emancipation of her children.

The police cruiser was moving slowly, almost sleepily, when it passed Tallon. There were two uniformed officers in front and two plainclothesmen in back. They were smoking cigarettes with a peaceful concentration, getting ready to go off duty, and Tallon could tell they were sorry they had seen him by the reluctant way in which the cruiser stopped. They even hesitated before they got out and began walking back to him — four small-town cops who could see their evening meals growing cold if this dusty stranger turned out to be the man they had been told to look for.

Tallon was sorry too. He looked down the long featureless road, then ducked his head and ran for the factory entrance. It was about twenty yards in front of him, so he had to run toward the police for a few seconds. They walked a little faster, glancing at each other, then gave startled shouts as Tallon cut through the entrance and loped across the tarmac apron leading to the nearest building. Hampered by the pack and the struggling dog, Tallon could only lumber along, and was surprised when he reached the lofty doors safely. Squeezing through the narrow opening, he looked back toward the gate and saw that the factory security men had belatedly come alert and were arguing with the police.

Inside the vast hangarlike room rows of storage racks held yellow plastic drums, hermetically sealed transit packages for electronic units. Tallon ran down an aisle, turned into one of the narrower transverse passages, and climbed into a rack, nestling down among the cylinders. As far as he could tell, there had been nobody in the room when he’d entered. He took out the automatic and cuddled the butt in his hand, suddenly conscious of how useless it was to a man with his particular handicap. It was doubtful if he would be able to persuade Seymour to look down the sights long enough to let him draw a decent bead on an elephant.

As the hammering in his heart eased off he reviewed his position. Nobody had come into the building yet, but that was probably because they were spreading out around it. The longer he waited, the less chance he’d have of getting out. Tallon dropped down from the rack and ran toward the end opposite to where he had come in. It was almost dark, but he could see that the walls of the building consisted of overlapping sliding-door systems throughout. Each of the huge doors had a standard-size door in it, which meant he could get out anywhere — provided he picked an exit that did not have someone waiting outside it.

Almost three-fourths of the way along the building he crossed to one of the small doors, hesitated a second, and slowly edged it open. There was a flat, vicious crack, and something hot plowed its way across his shoulders. Tallon leaped back from the door, which now had a circular, metal-tongued hole in it. Seymour was yelping loudly with fright and scrabbling at Tallon’s ribs while outside the raucous cries of startled seabirds drowned the gun’s echoes.

Wrong door, Tallon thought belatedly. He ran to the end of the building and grabbed a door handle, but did not pull it open. The unseen person who had fired at him would probably expect him to try again at the gable doors. He could now be waiting outside this very door. Tallon continued across the end of the building to another door, but he realized that his opponents would figure out that move as well. He could go back to the first door, but valuable seconds were racing by while he played guessing games; reinforcements were coming up, and everything was on their side. He couldn’t even see to shoot at them because he had to use the eyes of —

Of course!

Tallon’s fingers flickered over the eyeset’s selector studs. At the fifth attempt he was outside, flying in the darkling air, while down below him the dimly seen figures of two men moved along the many-doored gable. His spiraling flight took him higher … a glimpse along one side … more figures running … a dizzy, sweeping descent … another side of the same building … small trucks parked close to the wall, but no men in sight …

Tallon reselected Seymour’s eyes, oriented himself, and ran for the nearer wall. He burst out of a door, ran between two empty trucks, crossed a roadway, and went into a building like the one he had left. There were more lines of storage racks here, but this hangar was brightly lighted and stacker trucks were whining their way down several of the aisles. Tallon forced himself to walk slowly across the building. None of the truck drivers seemed to notice him, and he got to the other side and out into the cool evening air without any difficulty.

The next building was as deserted as the first. When he emerged from it Tallon judged that he was far enough from the center of activity to abandon cover. He went down the separating alley, moving away from the front boundary of the industrial complex. At the corner, the failing eyeset provided him with a misty view of scattered small buildings, stockyards, cranes, pylons, lights. To the northwest, the curving snouts of two furnaces reared up into the indigo sky. Factory whistles were hooting, great doors were slamming shut, cars with bright headlights were streaming toward the entrances.

Tallon realized he had been lucky to have the sprawling industrial nightmare close by when he had to run. He was aware of a warm stream of blood trickling down his back; and he realized that his legs were folding under him, and that he was on the verge of blindness.

The obvious thing to do now, Tallon thought, is to give myself up — except that I’ve given up giving myself up.

He angled off across the factory area, staggering a little, leaning against walls when walking became too difficult. Tallon knew he would present a ludicrous picture to anyone who looked at him, but two things were in his favor: in big state-owned projects the employees tend to see only what concerns their own work, and at the end of a shift they see even less.

An hour or two went by; then he found himself in the vicinity of the giant furnace stacks. Aware that he would have to lie down very soon, he picked his way across treacherously sliding piles of fuel and reached the rear of the furnaces, seeking a place of warmth. The fence marking the rear perimeter of the area loomed up above a jungle of climbing weeds. Tallon guessed he was about as far as he could get from the searching policemen and security guards, and he looked for a place to rest.

Between the furnaces and the fence, the climbing weeds and grasses were growing over untidy scrap heaps of packing cases and rusting metal framework, which looked like discarded assembly jigs. The big fires were quiescent in their ceramic ovens, but the heat from the stacks warmed the whole area. Tallon investigated several of the vegetation-shrouded heaps before he found a hole big enough to hide in. He slid wearily into the dusty little hole and pulled a screen of grass back over the entrance.

Maneuvering around for comfort, he discovered he could stretch out full length in the confined space. He gingerly put out his hand and found there was a tunnel leading toward the center of the stack, roofed and walled with random chunks of steel and discarded packing materials. Tallon wriggled a little farther in, then the effort became too great. He struggled free of the pack, laid his head on it, switched off the eyeset, and allowed the whole stinking universe to tilt away from him.

“Brother,” a voice said in the crawling darkness, “you have not introduced yourself.”

There were four of them — Ike, Lefty, Phil, and Denver.

The big attraction, Ike explained, was the heat. In every human society there are a few who are not equipped to make the grade, who have neither the will to work nor the strength to take. And so they live on scraps that fall from rich men’s tables. You will always find some of them in those few places where one or more of life’s necessities can be obtained simply by putting out a hand and waiting. Here there were falling scraps of heat that on a long winter’s night could mean the difference between sleeping and dying.

“You mean,” Tallon said drowsily, “that you’re hoboes.”

“That’s putting it crudely,” Ike replied in his thin nasal voice. “Have you any more of that delicious stale bread? Nature’s toast, I call it.”

“I don’t know.” Tallon’s back was hurting now and he longed for sleep. “How could I tell in the dark, anyway?”

Ike’s voice was mystified. “But, brother, we have our lumi-lamp on. Can’t you look in your bag? We’re hungry. Your new friends are hungry.”

“Sorry, new friend. I’m too tired to look, and if I wasn’t too tired it wouldn’t make any difference, because — ” Tallon made the effort — “I’m blind.” It was the first time he had ever announced it to anyone.

“I’m sorry.” Ike really sounded sorry. There was a long silence; then he said, “Can I ask you a question, brother?”

“What is it?”

“Those heavy gray glasses you’re wearing — why have blind men started wearing heavy gray glasses? What good are they when you have no eyes?”

Tallon lifted his head a few inches. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s the point of wearing — ”

“No!” Tallon broke in. “What did you mean when you said blind men have started wearing heavy gray glasses?”

“Well, brother, yours is the second pair I’ve seen this week. Ten miles or so north of here is a private estate owned by a very rich man who’s blind. Denver and I often climb the wall, because we both like fruit. The fruit trees there are overloaded, and it seems a shame not to relieve them of their burden. There are the dogs, of course, but during the day — ”

“The glasses,” Tallon interrupted. “What about the glasses?”

“That’s it, brother. We saw the blind man this week. He was walking in the orchards and was wearing glasses like yours. Now that I think of it, he was walking like a man who can see!”

Tallon felt a surge of excitement. “What’s his name?”

“I forget,” Ike replied. “I know he’s supposed to be related to the Moderator himself, and that he’s a mathematician or something. But I don’t remember his name.”

“His name,” Denver said eagerly, “is Carl Juste.”

“Why do you ask, brother?” Ike sniggered. “Did you think he might be a friend of yours?”

“Not exactly,” Tallon said coolly. “I’m more a friend of the family.”