Night Walk

sixteen

A spring morning, lovely with pastel mists, had moved in over New Wittenburg, bringing a feeling of life to the tree-lined streets, laying bars of clear, fresh sunlight across the concrete desert of the space terminal.

“This is as far as we go,” Tallon said as the car topped a rise in the road and he saw the city spread out before him. “I can walk from here.”

“Must we split up?” Helen slid the car over to the side of the road and allowed it to sink onto the ground. “I’m sure I could help you.”

“This is the way it has to be, Helen. We’ve been over the whole thing already.” Tallon spoke firmly to cover his own feelings of dismay at leaving her. The five days they had spent together at the motel had passed like so many seconds. In terms of affecting his life, however, they might have been decades. In loving her he had found both youth and a new level of maturity. But now the pea-sized capsule buried in his brain had acquired even greater importance than the brand-new planet it represented. Two other worlds were at stake, for if it came to war, neither Earth nor Emm Luther would survive in its present form.

It had taken him some time to persuade Helen that they ought to split up on reaching New Wittenburg. She had been unimpressed when he’d pointed out that slipping away from the Pavilion in defiance of an order was one thing, being caught in his company was another. In the end, he had told her he would be unable to make contact with his own agents while in the company of a government prison official.

“You’ll call me at my hotel, won’t you, Sam?”

“I’ll call you.” Tallon kissed her once, briefly, and got out of the car. As he was closing the door she caught his sleeve.

“You will call, Sam. You won’t leave without me?”

“I won’t leave without you,” Tallon lied.

With Seymour tucked under his arm, he began to walk into the city. The pale blue car ghosted past, and he tried for a last glimpse of Helen, but Seymour jerked his head in the wrong direction. He had deemed it necessary for them to separate because if he and Cherkassky should meet again, it would be here in New Wittenburg. The trouble was, no matter how things worked out, the separation was going to be permanent. If he were to get off the planet undetected, there would be no coming back; and with what his escape would cost Emm Luther, there would be no hope of Helen’s being free to follow him.

Tallon walked quickly, staying relaxed, but keeping an eye out for patrol cars or uniformed men on foot. He had no definite plan for making contact, but New Wittenburg was the one city in which the Block had been able to build an effective organization on Emm Luther. His original orders had been to stay on the loose near the space terminal until he was contacted, and that was what he intended to do now, three months later. Considering the publicity his escape from the Pavilion had received, the organization was bound to be making preparations to receive him.

The contact came sooner than he expected.

Tallon was moving along a quiet street, heading in the general direction of the hotel where it had all started, when he suddenly lost vision. He stopped and fought down the surge of panic, then discovered that moving his eyes slightly to the left brought back his sight. Evidently the signal beam from the eyeset had been deflected from the optic nerve juncture, which suggested he had entered a powerful force field of some sort. He had just decided it must be emanating from the interior of a heavy truck parked beside him at the curb when — snap!

Tallon staggered and grabbed for support. He was in a long narrow box, lined with power circuitry and lighted by a single fluorescent tube overhead. Hands caught him from behind, steadying him.

“That was neat,” Tallon said. “I guess I’m inside the truck.”

“Correct,” a voice said. “Welcome to New Wittenburg, Sam.”

Tallon turned and saw a tall, youngish, thin-shouldered man, with tousled hair and a slightly crumpled nose. They both lurched as the truck began to move.

“I’m Vic Fordyce,” he said. “I was beginning to think you’d never get here.”

“So was I. Why didn’t somebody go south to watch for me along the way?”

“They did. And most of them were in the Pavilion before your bunk had a chance to cool down. The E.L.S.P. boys must have staked out every Earthsider on the planet. One suspicious move and that was it.”

“I thought it might be like that,” Tallon said. “Cherkassky is thorough, if nothing else. But what was the idea of grabbing me off the sidewalk? Wouldn’t it have been easier to open the door and whistle?”

Fordyce grinned. “That’s what I said; but this rig was specially built to lift you right out of an E.L.S.P. cruiser, if necessary, and I guess they didn’t want to let all that perfectly good gray-component gear go to waste. Talking about special gear — are those glasses the radarlike device we’ve been hearing about? How in hell did you get the chance to build something like that?”

Tallon thought of Helen Juste and it hurt. “It’s a long story, Vic. What happens next?”

“Well, I have a drug pack here in the truck. I’m to administer it while the boys up front cruise around the city; then we take you to the spaceport. You should be on board your ship within an hour.”

“Within an hour! But the schedule — ”

“Schedule!” Fordyce interrupted excitedly. “Sam, you’re an important man now; scheduled flights are out as far as you’re concerned. The Block has sent a special ship for you. It’s registered on Parane as a merchantman, and you’re going aboard as a crew replacement.”

“Won’t look a bit suspicious? What if some spaceport official starts checking on why a Paranian ship should come to Emm Luther just to pick up a new crewman?”

“That would take time, and once you’re aboard the Lyle Star you’re as good as home. It looks like a merchantman, but it’s fast and has the firepower of several battle cruisers. They’re prepared to flatten the whole city to get you out.”

Fordyce moved about the gently swaying interior of the truck, switching off the gray-component equipment. Tallon sat down on a box and stroked Seymour, who lay on Tallon’s knees and uttered low growls of contentment. After what he had been through, Tallon thought, it was impossible to believe he was almost in the clear. Within an hour, a mere hundred minutes, he would be on board a ship and ready to lift off from New Wittenburg, leaving behind him Lorin Cherkassky, the Pavilion, the swamp, Amanda Weisner — everything connected with this world. And Helen. The thought of leaving her was especially painful now that the final break was imminent.

Fordyce unfolded a low stretcherlike cot along the floor and opened a black plastic box. He motioned to the bed.

“There it is, Sam. Lie down on this and we’ll get on with the job. I’m told this hurts a bit, but it wears off after a few hours.”

Tallon lay down and Fordyce stooped over him.

“In a way you’re lucky,” Fordyce said as he held a syringe up to the light. “The masking of the eye pigmentation and retinal patterns is always the most painful, but you’ve nothing to worry about, have you?”

“You sound like the medic back in the Pavilion,” Tallon replied wryly. “He seemed to enjoy his work, too.”

The treatment was not as bad as Tallon had anticipated. Some of the processes — darkening his skin and lightening his hair — were completely painless; others hurt a bit, or were uncomfortable. Fordyce worked quickly and expertly as he administered the necessary injections. Some of the needles were inserted just beneath skin of Tallon’s fingertips, distorting the patterns. Some were plunged deep into major muscle groups, producing tension or relaxation, subtly altering his posture, his bodily dimensions, even his walk. The same techniques, on a reduced scale, were applied to his face.

While the drugs were taking effect Fordyce helped Tallon change into fresh clothing from the skin out. The suit was gray, casual, and completely nondescript, which looked right for a spacehand laying up between tours of duty. Tallon enjoyed the civilized feel of clean clothing against his skin, especially the shoes and socks, although the shoes were built up to make him appear taller.

“That’s it, Sam,” Fordyce said finally, with evident satisfaction. “You wouldn’t know your own mother, or something like that. Here are your papers and your new identity. They’re more than good enough to get you through the spaceport checkpoints.”

“How about money?”

“You won’t need it. We’re dropping you right at the terminal. You’ll have to get rid of the dog, of course.”

“Seymour stays with me.”

“But what if — ”

“Was there any mention of a dog being with me — from official sources, or in any of the papers or broadcasts?”

“No, but — ”

“Then Seymour stays.” Tallon explained that his eyeset worked by picking up optic nerve signals from the dog’s eyes. And besides, he liked Seymour and would have been taking him anyway. Fordyce shrugged and looked carefully unconcerned. The truck began to slow down, and Tallon picked up the dog.

“Here we are, Sam,” Fordyce said. “The space terminal. When you get through the main gates take the slideway to the north side. You’ll find the Lyle Star in docking area N. 128. Captain Tweedie will be expecting you.”

Suddenly Tallon was reluctant to go. Space was big, cold, and endless, and he was not prepared for it.

“Listen, Vic,” he stalled, “this is a bit sudden, isn’t it? I was expecting to talk to someone here in New Wittenburg. Doesn’t the cell leader want to see me?”

“We’re processing you just the way the Block wants it done. Goodbye, Sam.”

The truck began to move as soon as Tallon had stepped down. He lifted Seymour to his chest and surveyed the half-mile stretch of passenger and cargo entrances, from which branches of slideways and roads fanned out toward a dazzling white concrete horizon. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes moved among the reception buildings, warehouses, and vast service hangars. The gleaming whale-backs of ships in their cradles sparkled in the morning sun; and high up in the blue of the sky were the bright sequins that were other ships drifting in on finals.

Tallon took a deep breath and began to walk. He discovered that the treatment not only changed his appearance; it also made him feel different. He walked steadily, but with a strange rhythm, noting that buses and taxis were discharging their passengers outside the gates and onto the main slideway system. Joining the steady stream of pedestrians, he found the entrance reserved for port officials and flight crews. The bored-looking clerk barely glanced at his papers before handing them back. Tallon noticed two other men lounging in the office behind the clerk. They too seemed totally uninterested in flight personnel; but Tallon had no doubt that sensors, linked to a computer, had scanned and measured him from head to foot, and would have screamed their plastic heads off had he fit their specifications.

Hardly believing he was through the checkpoint so easily, Tallon took the north-bound slideway, looking for the Lyle Star as the high-speed belt carried him between rows of ships. It was a long time since he had been so close to space vessels, and through Seymour’s eyes he saw them with a new clarity, suddenly aware of how unreal they looked in the morning light. The huge metal ellipsoids lay helplessly in their cradles, many of them with raised hatches that were cantilevered like insect’s wing casings. Cargo-handling and servicing vehicles were clustered at the open hatches.

There were no other exploitable worlds in the Lutheran system, so all the ships in the port were interstellar craft, fitted with three entirely separate drives. Gravity negators were used at take off, allowing the big ships to fall upward into the sky; but these were effective only so long as there was a strong gravitic field available to be twisted back on itself. When a planet’s portal was a long distance off, as most of them were, ion-reaction drives punched the ships out to it in the old-fashioned way. Then came the null-space drives. that — in some half-understood way — sucked the big ships into another universe in which the game of energy versus mass was played with different rules.

Tallon noted that of the many uniforms he saw in and around the terminal, the gray cords of the E.L.S.P. men were the most common. There was no doubt that the net was out for him, yet he had strolled right through it. Although Cherkassky’s resources were limited compared with those of the Block, this was, after all, his home ground. It was almost as if …

A sign reading “N.128” loomed up, and Tallon edged across the progressively slower strips until he could step off onto the concrete. He began walking down a lateral row of ships, looking for the centaur symbol carried by Paranian vessels. A few paces along the row a slab-shouldered giant, in a black uniform with gold insignia, stepped out from behind a crane, in whose shade he had been standing.

“You’re Tallon?”

“That’s right.” Tallon was taken aback by the stranger’s size. Everybody looked big to Tallon while he was carrying his eyes under his arm, but this man was extraordinary, a towering pyramid of muscle and bone.

“Captain Tweedie of the Lyle Star. I’m glad you made it, Tallon.”

“I’m glad, too. Where’s the ship?” Tallon tried hard to sound glad, but he kept thinking about the eighty thousand portals that lay between Emm Luther and Earth. Soon they would be between Helen and himself. She would be waiting in a hotel room in New Wittenburg, and he would be eighty thousand portals away, so many giant zigzag steps across the heavens, with no chance of getting back. Red hair and whiskey-colored eyes. … No colors in the dark… .I wish I were where Helen lies.… No colors, but texture and warmth and communion… .Night and day on me she cries.…

Tweedie pointed toward the far end of the line and began to walk quickly. Tallon kept up with him for several yards, then realized it was no good this way.

“Captain,” he said calmly. “You go on ahead to the ship and wait for me.”

“What do you mean?” Tweedie turned instantly, like a huge cat. His eyes flashed from beneath the visor of his cap.

“I’ve got to go back into the city for an hour; I left something behind.” Tallon kept his voice flat and cool while his mind kept chanting, What am I doing? What am I doing? What …

Tweedie smiled humorlessly, showing unusually thick teeth. “Tallon,” he said with exaggerated patience, “I don’t know what you’re thinking about, and I don’t want to find out. All I know is, you will board my ship — right now.”

“I will board your ship,” Tallon said, taking a step back, “in an hour from now. Since when did chauffeurs start giving orders?”

“This is a new category of treachery, Tallon. You’ll not survive it.”

“What do you intend doing about it, Captain?”

Tweedie shifted his feet and leaned his bulk forward slightly, like a wrestler preparing to bomb a smaller opponent. “Let’s put it like this,” he said stiffly. “The Block is interested in getting your head back to Earth. Whether it’s still attached to your body, or not attached to your body, is a minor detail.”

“You’ll have a job catching me,” Tallon said, backing away, “unless you want to call a policeman. There are plenty of them about at the moment.”

Tweedie crooked his massive fingers, the joints making audible cracks, then glanced around him helplessly. A pair of E.L.S.P. men were drifting past on the slideway only a few paces from him, and his ship was a good four hundred yards away across the crowded apron.

“Sorry, Captain.” Tallon walked confidenfly toward the moving belt. “You’ll have to be patient a little longer. You can have your most comfortable G-cell ready for me when I get back.”

“I warn you, Tallon.” Tweedie’s voice was thick with anger and frustration. “If you get on that slideway, you’ll make the trip back to Earth in a hatbox.”

Tallon shrugged elaborately and kept walking. Ten minutes later he was back on the roadway outside the airport entrance. Getting out had been even easier than getting in. He stuffed his papers into an inside pocket, then shifted the uncomplaining Seymour to a more comfortable position on his chest while he decided the best way to reach Helen’s hotel. Off to his right a commotion broke out at one of the entrances, and he automatically turned in the opposite direction.

It would take some time to reach Helen, and he would have to be more careful than ever. Tweedie had not been joking. Sam Tallon had crossed up the Block — something a man did only once — and now two groups of agents would be fanning out through the city, looking for him. Knowing the Block as he did, Tallon was uncomfortably aware that his chance for survival would probably be better if the E.L.S.P. got to him first.

Hunching his shoulders to light a cigarette, Tallon walked into the city.