Night Walk

seventeen

Tallon was surprised to discover he had one advantage over his adversaries. The discovery came when he glimpsed his own reflection in a store window and failed, for a moment, to recognize himself. What he saw was a tallish, fair-haired stranger walking with a round-shouldered professorial gait. His face seemed broader, composed of flatter planes, and Tallon knew himself only by the dog tucked under his arm.

That, he decided, would also be a useful identification for Earth agents as well. He thought about it for a moment, then had an idea. The chance was worth taking.

“Down you go, Seymour,” Tallon whispered. “You’ve been a passenger far too long.”

He set the dog at his feet and commanded him to heel. Seymour yelped and sped round Tallon’s ankles several times in frantic, skidding turns. Steadying himself in a suddenly whirling universe, Tallon gave the order to heel again and was relieved when the dog, apparently having expressed his feelings to his own satisfaction, obediently fell in behind him.

He began to walk again, guided by Seymour’s affectionate view of his rising and falling heels, but it proved too difficult, and he adjusted the eyeset controls until he received vision from someone behind him. Helen was staying at the Conan on South 53rd Street, a hotel she had frequented on previous visits to the city. It was some four miles from the spaceport.

Periodically cursing his lack of taxi fare, he plodded on through the unseasonable heat, feeling the built-up shoes beginning to blister his heels. He saw patrol cars nosing through the traffic several times, but they were obviously on routine circuits of the city. Once again Tallon found himself thinking vaguely that it was all too easy, that his luck was too good to be true.

The Conan turned out to be, by Emm Luther standards, a first-class hotel. Tallon halted in a doorway on the opposite side of the street and considered a new problem. Helen Juste was probably a minor celebrity — as a relative of the Temporal Moderator, a member of the prison board, and a woman of some wealth — and therefore an easy mark for the police, especially while staying at a hotel in which she was known. Walking up to the desk and asking for her could be the last mistake he would get the chance to make.

He decided to wait where he was and watch for her either leaving or entering the hotel. Half an hour went by and it seemed an eternity; Tallon began to feel he should move on. Then he had another thought: How did he know Helen was in there at all? She could have been taken away already, or unable to get a room, or she could have changed her mind. He dithered for another ten minutes, until Seymour began to get restless and started tugging on his trouser leg. Tallon got an idea; the dog seemed to be intelligent, so why not … ?

“Listen, boy,” Tallon whispered, hunkering down beside Seymour. “Find Helen. In there. Find Helen.” He pointed to the hotel entrance, where several groups were standing and talking.

Through the eyes of a passerby Tallon saw Seymour scramble across the street and disappear, with wagging tail, into the lobby. He reselected Seymour’s vision signals and immediately was weaving an uncertain course through the lobby, only a few inches above the carpet. There were more close-ups of stairs, skirting boards, and door jambs. Tallon, fascinated by the dog’s progress, could almost hear him sniffing as he tried for Helen’s scent. Finally he was looking at the base of a white door, saw forefeet paw at it, and then Helen’s face appeared, curious, surprised, laughing.

When she carried Seymour out to the street Tallon glimpsed his own gray-clad figure waiting in the doorway across the street. He waved, and she crossed the street and came over to him.

“Sam! What’s happened to you? You look — ”

“There’s no time, Helen. Do you still want to try flicker-transits?”

“You know I do. What do I need to pack?”

“There’s no time for packing either.” Having got this far, Tallon suddenly felt sick with anxiety, with the feeling that his luck couldn’t hold out. “If you’ve got cab fare we’ll leave right now.”

“All right, Sam. I’ve got the cab fare.”

With Seymour under his arm, Tallon took Helen’s hand, and they started walking and looking for a cruising taxi. He explained most of the situation to her as they walked. A few minutes later they caught a vacant robo-cab. Tallon fell back in the seat while Helen punched out their destination and fed a bill into the waiting rollers. His nerves were twanging a thin fierce tune, like high-tension cables in a gale. He wanted to scream. Even touching Helen and looking at her made no difference; the whole universe was falling in on him, and he would have to run very, very fast.

In the last block before the space terminal, Tallon reached out and pressed the button that stopped the cab. They got out and walked the rest of the way, Tallon’s instincts making him feel safer on the ground.

“When we get to the entrance,” he said, “we’ll have to separate for a few minutes. I’m supposed to be a Paranian crewman, so I go in by the staff entrance on the right. You get a sightseer’s ticket and go in at one of the other doors. We’ll meet at this end of the main north-bound slideway.”

“Will it be all right, Sam? Surely nobody can simply walk onto a ship, without formalities, and fly away.”

“Don’t worry. Terminals like this are too big for centralized customs and emigration checks. There’s a field neutralizer in every docking cradle that prevents the ship in it from lifting off until the customs and migration teams have worked it over.”

“Isn’t that just as bad from our point of view?”

“This is no ordinary ship. It’ll have something on board to jam the neutralizer. We won’t have to wait for any checks.”

“But your people won’t be expecting you to bring me aboard.”

“Trust me, Helen. Everything’s going to be fine.” Tallon stretched his lips into a smile. He hoped it looked better than it felt.

Approaching the black tunnel of the crew entrance, Tallon felt icy sweat break out on his forehead. When Seymour’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the tunnel Tallon discovered that nothing had changed. The same bored-looking clerk glanced perfunctorily at his papers; the same plainclothes men lounged in the cramped office. Tallon picked up his papers, walked on through to the sunlit edge of the field, and saw Helen waiting. She looked impossibly perfect, smiling as though they were going to a dance, Tallon thought, and had instinctive feeling that she was not a good dancer.

Tallon’s gloom increased, though he could not pinpoint its cause. Then as they stepped onto the slideway the idea that had been prowling the hinterlands of his subconscious rose to the surface.

“Helen,” he said, “how far is it from here to the Pavilion?”

“Something like a thousand miles — a bit more; I’m not certain.”

“A long way for a blind man to travel without being picked up, especially when somebody like Cherkassky is on his tail.”

“Well, you said you had been lucky.”

“That’s what’s worrying me — I was never lucky before. I get the feeling that Cherkassky might be playing games. Picking me up on the road wouldn’t be much of a feather in his cap; but suppose he let me get to where I was going first? Then he could net himself an Earth ship and its crew.”

Helen looked subdued. “He’d be taking a big responsibility on himself.”

“Perhaps not. The negotiations on Akkab over territorial acquisitions have broken down, but a lot of people in the empire think the Lutherians are holding on too tight, acting like dogs in a manger. It would suit Emm Luther quite well if a fat, juicy incident occurred — for example, a Block-owned ship disguised as a Paranian merchantman being caught in the act of smuggling out a spy.”

The breeze began to flick Helen’s hair as they moved over onto the higher speed strips of the slideway. She held the coppery strands in place with spread fingers.

“What are you going to do, Sam? Go back?”

Tallon shook his head. “I’ve quit going back. And, besides, I could be overestimating Cherkassky. This might be entirely my own idea and not his. It’s funny, though, that I was able to walk into the city and to your hotel without any bother from either side. Lucky again, it seems.”

“It seems.”

“We’ll get off this thing a little early, just in case.”

They stepped off the slideway at N.125, three rows short of the one in which he had encountered Tweedie. Tallon noticed that Helen was still wearing her green uniform and did not look at all out of place in the anonymous activity of the field. Everything — from the ships themselves to the cargo-handling plant and cargo pallets — was on such a huge scale that two extra specks of humanity were all but invisible. It took them twenty minutes to reach the end of the row and start moving northward again. Tallon stopped when he saw the green centaur of Parane on the prow of a fat, silver-gray vessel up ahead.

“Can you read the name on that ship? Seymour’s a little near-sighted.”

Helen shaded her eyes from the lowering sun. “Lyle Star.”

“That’s the one.”

He caught her arm, drew her into the lee of a line of cargo pallets stacked high with crates, and they began walking again, keeping out of the line of sight of anyone who might be watching from the ship. As he got closer Tallon saw that none of the cradles adjacent to the Lyle Star were occupied. It could be coincidence — or it could be that somebody had cleared a space for action. The ship itself was completely sealed up into flight configuration, except for the crew entrance door lying open near the nose. There was no sign of life on or near the vessel.

“It doesn’t look right,” Tallon said, “and it doesn’t look wrong. I think we ought to hide somewhere and watch things for a while.”

They moved closer, crossing open spaces only when lumbering mobile cranes provided cover, and got to within about a hundred yards of the Lyle Star. The light was fading, and the day crews were beginning to thin out to the point where the presence of two unauthorized persons might seem suspicious. Tallon looked around for a hiding place and decided on a crane parked close by. He brought Helen over to the massive yellow machine, which towered over their heads. Opening an inspection hatch in the engine compartment, Tallon brought out his papers and stood glancing from them to the open hatch and back again, hoping he looked like a maintenance inspector at work.

“Make sure nobody’s watching you,” he ordered, “then get inside.”

Helen gave a gasp of surprise and did as she was told. Tallon checked his surroundings, got in after her, and closed the hatch. In the choking, oil-smelling darkness they edged their way round the great rotary engines to the side of the crane nearest the Lyle Star. A row of ventilation louvers gave them a good view of the ship and the intervening area of concrete.

“I’m sorry about this bit of nonsense,” Tallon said. “I suppose you feel like a kid hiding in a hollow bush?”

“Something like that,” she whispered, and moved closer to him in the blackness. “Do you often do this sort of thing?”

“It isn’t usually this ludicrous, but the job does get pretty childish sometimes. As far as I can see, nearly all so-called affairs of state require at least one unfortunate to crawl along a sewer on his belly, or the like.”

“Why don’t you quit?”

“I intend to. That’s why I don’t want to risk walking into Cherkassky’s arms at this stage of the game.”

“But you don’t really think he’s in that ship?”

Tallon held Seymour to the nearest louver to see out. “No; it’s just a possibility. But things look too quiet over there.”

“Can’t you tune your eyeset to someone inside and see who’s there?”

“Good idea, but it doesn’t work; I’ve just tried it. The signals are highly directional, and the hull must be too thick to let them through anywhere but at the direct vision panels — and they’re all right up at the top of the nose section.”

“How long do we wait in here then?” Helen had begun to sound depressed.

“Just till it gets a little darker; then we’ll try Seymour. If he’ll go in through the airlock, I should be able to keep in touch with him long enough to see if there’s a reception party inside.”

When the sun had gone down and the blue lights blazed on the perimeter of the field, Tallon eased the little dog down onto the concrete, out through the ground-clearance space, and pointed him toward the ship. Seymour wagged his tail uncertainly and trotted toward the dark hull of the Lyle Star. Using Helen’s eyes for a moment, Tallon watched the dog wander across the apron and up the short ramp. At the top, Seymour was silhouetted for a moment against the lemon-colored rays pouring from the ship’s interior. Tallon pushed Seymour’s stud on the eyeset just in time to get a dog’s eye view of a booted foot lashing toward him.

Tallon, crouched in the crane’s engine compartment a hundred yards away, heard Seymour’s startled yelp. A few moments later the dog had returned to the crane and was shivering in Tallon’s arms. Tallon soothed the terrier as he wondered what the next move should be.

It had been only a fraction of a second, but it was all he’d needed to recognize the blond, chunky sergeant who had assisted Cherkassky with the brain-brush the night they’d tried to erase Tallon’s mind.