Night Walk

fifteen

Helen Juste: Twenty-eight years old, unmarried, beautiful, honors degree in social sciences at the Lutheran University, member of the planet’s premier family, holder of a governmental executive position — and a complete failure as a human being.

As she drove northward she tried to analyze the interactions of character and circumstance that had led to her present situation. There was her older brother, of course, but perhaps it was too easy to blame everything on Carl. He had always been there, looming big, a kind of landmark by which to steer through life; but over the years the landmark had crumbled.

The erosion began when their parents and Peter, their younger brother, were drowned in a speedboat accident near Easthead. Carl, in his last year at university, was driving the boat. He began to drink heavily after that, which would have been serious enough on any other world. On Emm Luther, where abstention was part of the very political and social structure, it was almost suicidal. He managed to hold together for three years, joining the space-probe design center as a mathematician; then a case of substandard bootleg brandy had cost him his eyesight.

She helped install him in his private estate, which would have cost a prohibitive amount had the Moderator not fixed it for Carl, partly out of family feeling and partly out of a desire to get him tucked safely away from the public eye. Since then, she had watched Carl grow more and more neurotic, break up into smaller and smaller pieces.

At first she had assumed she would be able to help; but looking within herself, she had found nothing to offer Carl. Nothing to offer anybody. Just a tremendous sense of inadequacy and loneliness. She tried to get Carl to emigrate temporarily with her to another world, perhaps even to Earth itself, where an operation to give him some form of artificial vision would have been legal. But he had been afraid to go against the Moderator’s wishes, to face the soul-attenuation of the flicker-transits, to leave the comfortable womb-darkness of his new home.

When Detainee Winfield had told her about Tallon’s idea for a seeing device it had seemed to be the answer to everything, although, looking back, she realized she had been wrong to suppose that making Carl happy in that particular way would have compensated for her personal inadequacies. She had broken every rule in the book to bring about the creation of the seeing devices, finally going too far for even the Moderator’s protection, only to see Carl use his new eyes to seek out other forms of darkness… .

After Winfield and Tallon had made their preposterous escape there had been a preliminary investigation by the prison board; as a result, she had been suspended from duty and confined to her quarters pending a full inquiry. An impulse had led her to slip away and head north to see Carl for perhaps the last time, and — with a strange inevitability — Tallon had been there too.

She glanced at Tallon, sitting beside her in the front seat, with the dog lying sleepily across his knees. He had changed since the first day she saw him walking so hesitantly with the box of the sonar torch strapped to his forehead. His face was much thinner, taut with strain and fatigue, but somehow more composed. She noticed that his hands, resting lightly on the dog’s tousled back, were at peace.

“Tell me,” she said, “do you really believe you’ll get back to Earth?”

“I don’t think that far ahead any more.”

“But you’re anxious to get back. What is Earth like?”

Tallon smiled faintly. “The kids ride red tricycles.”

Helen stared at the road. It was beginning to rain, and white road markers streamed under the car like tracer bullets aimed from the darkening horizon ahead.

Some time later she noticed that Tallon had begun to shiver. Within minutes his face was covered with perspiration.

“I told you to give yourself up,” she said casually. “You need attention.”

“How long will it take to reach New Wittenburg if we don’t stop?”

“Assuming you want me to keep within the speed limit — about ten or eleven hours.”

“That’s heading straight north? Along the strip?”

“Yes.”

Tallon shook his head. “Cherkassky is probably waiting for me along the strip, and he’s bound to have a description of this car. You’d better head east, up into the mountains.”

“But that will take a lot longer, and you haven’t even the strength to hold out till we reach New Wittenburg the short way.” Helen wondered vaguely why she was arguing over the welfare of the unimpressive Earthsider. Can this, she thought with a sense of shock, be the way it begins?

“Then it doesn’t matter which way we go,” Tallon said impatiently. “Head east.”

Helen took the first lateral road they came to. The car hummed effortlessly through several miles of neatly laid out, high-density residential developments, identical to all the others on the continent. Suburbia without the urbs. She wondered again what her life would have been like had she been born on another planet, into an ordinary family. Without the social isolation of rank, she might have married and had children … to someone — the thought came unbidden, yet with the force of a planet in its orbit — like Tallon. She sheered away from it. In another life she could have traveled; he had done that too, more than anybody she had ever met before.

She glanced across at Tallon again. “Is space flight very frightening?”

He started slightly, and she realized he had been drifting into sleep.

“Not really. They give you equanimol shots an hour before the first jump, and a whiff of something stronger before the ship hits the portal. The next thing you know, you’ve arrived.”

“But have you ever done it without tranquillizers and anaesthetic?”

“I’ve never done it with them,” Tallon said with unexpected force. “You know the one big flaw in the null-space drive, as we employ it? It’s the only form of travel ever devised that doesn’t broaden the mind. People shunt their bodies right across the galaxy, but mentally they’re still inside the orbit of Mars. If they were made to sweat it out without shots, to feel themselves being spread thinner and thinner, to know what flicker-transits really mean — then things might be different.”

“What sort of things?”

“Like you being a Lutherian and me being an Earther.”

“How strange,” she said aloud; “an idealistic spy.” But she made a silent acknowledgment to herself: This is the way it begins. Twenty-eight years it had taken her to discover that she could not become a complete human being by herself. The sad thing was that it had begun with someone like Tallon and would therefore have to be stopped right away. She saw that his eyes were closed again behind the heavy frames of the eyeset, and that Seymour had slipped into a contented doze — which meant Tallon was in darkness and drifting into sleep.

She began to draw up a plan. Tallon was weakened by strain, exhaustion, and the effects of his wound, but something about his long thoughtful face told her he would still be too much for her to handle alone. If she could further lull him and keep him awake till nightfall, it might then be possible to do something after he’d gone to sleep. She searched for a subject that would interest him, but could think of nothing. The car was moving into the green foothills of the continental spine when Tallon himself began to talk in an effort to fight off unconsciousness.

“Something puzzles me about the Lutheran salary system,” he said. “Everybody gets paid in hours and minutes; and even with the factorization clauses, the maximum that, say, a top-notch surgeon could earn in an hour is three hours — right?”

“Correct.” Helen repeated familiar words: “In his wisdom, the first Temporal Moderator removed the temptations of unlimited material gain from the path of cur spiritual progress.”

“Never mind the catechism. What I want to know is, how can somebody like your brother, and presumably the rest of your family, have so much more money than anybody else? How does that estate of Carl’s, for instance, square with the system?”

“It squares with the system, as you put it, because the Moderator accepts no payment at all for his services on behalf of the people of Emm Luther. His needs are taken care of by voluntary donations from his flock. Anything he receives in excess of his needs is disposed of as he sees fit, usually to relieve suffering or need.”

“The head man shares his bounty with his friends and relatives,” Tallon said. “I wish Doc Winfield were here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Who does? What field of mathematics was your brother in?”

Helen was about to make a sarcastically evasive answer suitable for a political agent who poked his nose into the realm of higher mathematics; then she remembered Tallon’s work on the seeing devices. And an entry in his dossier, she now recalled, stated that he had begun his career as a researcher in domain physics before, inexplicably, becoming a kind of supertramp and finally an agent.

“I couldn’t understand Carl’s work,” she said. “It had something to do with the theory that the null-space universe is much smaller than ours — perhaps only a few hundred yards in diameter. He told me once that the two-light-second spheres we call portals might correspond to single atoms in the null-space continuum.”

“I’ve heard the idea kicked around,” Tallon replied. “Was he getting anywhere with it?”

“You know that all information about space-probe design is grade-one classified.”

“I know; but you said you couldn’t understand it anyway, so what can you give away?”

“Well … as far as I know, Carl was on the team that decided the jump increment and coordinates for the Aitch Mühlenberg probe. The round trip has a smaller number of portals than any other route in the empire. Carl said it meant they could build cheaper spaceships, though I don’t see why.”

“Ships for the Aitch Muhlenberg run would be cheaper because they wouldn’t need such high reliability standards in their positional control equipment. With a smaller number of hops, there’s less chance of something going wrong along the way. But that probe was an isolated success, wasn’t it? They weren’t able to pick up any other worlds using the same sort of math.”

“I suppose not,” Helen said, concentrating on the ascending sweeps of the road, “but Carl didn’t believe it was pure coincidence.”

“I know how he felt. It’s tough to give up a perfectly good theory just because it doesn’t fit the facts. Is he doing anything with it now?”

“He’s blind now.”

“So what?” Tallon spoke harshly. “A man doesn’t have to lie down just because he loses his eyes. Of course it took someone like Lorin Cherkassky to teach me that, so perhaps I have an advantage over your brother.”

“Mr. Cherkassky,” Helen said impatiently, “is a senior executive of the Lutheran government and — ”

“I know; if there were flies on Emm Luther he wouldn’t harm one of them. The government of Earth has its faults, but when there’s a dirty job to be done, it does the dirty job. It doesn’t subcontract the work to somebody else and pretend nothing’s happening. I’ll tell you something; I’ll tell you what Mr. Cherkassky is really like.”

Helen did not interrupt as Tallon told her about his arrest, the use of the brain-brush, his attack on Cherkassky, the blinding, and his certain knowledge that Cherkassky would finish him off at the first opportunity.

Helen Juste let Tallon talk because it kept him awake, which meant he’d sleep more soundly later; and somewhere along the way she understood that everything he was saying was true. Unfortunately it made no difference: He was still an enemy of her world, and his capture was still her passport back to her former position of trust and responsibility.

She drove more slowly now. Tallon kept on talking, and she found it easy to join in. By the time dusk had begun to drift down from the sky in minute gray specks, they had gone beyond mere conversation into real communication — an experience completely new to Helen. She had risked calling him Sam, working it in as naturally as possible, and he had accepted the implied shift in their relationship without comment. He seemed to have grown smaller, as if his illness had caused him to physically shrink; mentally he was suffering from fatigue. Aware of his condition, Helen now made her move.

“There’s a motel up ahead, Sam, and you’ve got to sleep.”

“And what would you be doing while I slept?”

“I’m calling a truce. I’ve been a long time without sleep, too.”

“A truce, sweetie — why?”

“I told you — I’m tired. Besides, you took a risk to help Carl; and after what you told me about Mr. Cherkassky, I don’t want to be the one to hand you over to him.” It was all true, and she found it was easy to lie when you were telling the truth.

Tallon nodded thoughtfully, eyes closed, sweat gleaming on his forehead.

The motel was on the outskirts of a small community that was gathered on a ledge of the mountain range. Along the central part of the main street, store windows shone in the evening twilight and tubes of colored neon were bright threads against the towering black mass of the peaks beyond. The town was quiet, even at that early hour, as it huddled at the bottom of an invisible stream of cool wind that coursed from the uplands toward the ocean.

Helen stopped the car at the motel office and paid for a double chalet. The manager was a leaden-eyed, middle-aged man in an unbuttoned shirt — the archetype of all motel managers — who took her money mechanically, seeming hardly to hear her story that her husband was suffering from a cold and had to rest as soon as possible. She took the key and drove the car along the row of vine-covered chalets to number 9.

Tallon was holding the automatic in his right hand when she opened the car door at his side, but he was shivering so violently she was almost tempted to disarm him herself. There was no need, however, to take even that much of a chance. She helped him out of the car and into the chalet, supporting almost half his weight. He kept muttering apologies and thanks to nobody in particular, and she knew he was close to delirium. The rooms were cold and smelled like snow. She steered him onto the bed, and he curled up gratefully, like a child, as she pulled the covers over him.

“Sam,” she whispered, “there’s a drugstore a couple of blocks away. I’m going to get something for you. I won’t be long.”

“That’s right You get me something.”

Helen stood up with the automatic in her hand. She had won, and it had been easy. He spoke as she was going out the bedroom door. “Helen,” he said weakly, using her name for the first time, “ask the police to bring me a few extra blankets when they come.”

She closed the door quickly and ran through the little living room out into the sharp night air. What did it matter that he knew where she was going? Her mind kept straying into an endless mirror-dialogue — I know; I know you know; I know you know I know… .

The truth of the matter, she decided, was simply that she felt guilty about handing him over, knowing what she now knew about Cherkassky, knowing what she now knew about Tallon. He was too ill to do anything about it, but it had been important to her to trick Tallon in exactly the same way she would have tricked him had he been well. All right. He had seen through the trick. She could stand a little more guilt.

Helen opened the car door and got in. Seymour uncurled from the passenger seat and nuzzled her hand. Pushing the dog away from her, she reached for the radio panel, then pulled back her hand. Her heart had begun a slow, steady pounding that stirred the hair at her temples. She got out of the car and went back into the chalet, locking the door behind her.

As she stood over the bed, removing the eyeset from his face, Sam Tallon moved restlessly and moaned in his sleep.

This, she thought as she unbuttoned the blouse of her uniform, is the way it all begins.