Night Walk

one

A winter night, sharp and frozen, had moved in over New Wittenburg, pressing down hard on the bitter streets, laying uneven swaths of frost on the concrete desert of the space terminal.

Tallon leaned against the window of his room, looking out. The long hours of night lay ahead, and he wondered how he was going to get through. Not even the possibility of passing through the eighty thousand portals that led to Earth could ease his depression. He had dozed on top of the rumpled bedclothes for several hours, and during that time the world seemed to have died. The hotel felt empty.

He lit a cigarette and exhaled a gentle river of smoke that coursed flatly along the glass of the window. Little circular areas of condensation formed on the inside of the glass, centered on droplets that clung to the outside.

Were they going to come for him?

The question was a dull ache that had gnawed at him since he made the pickup a week earlier.

Normally the probability of success would have been high, but this time there were things Tallon did not like. He drew hard on the heady smoke, making the cigarette crackle faintly. It had been lousy luck, McNulty having a heart attack just when he did; but it had also been an error on the part of someone back in the Block. What in hell were they doing, putting a man into the field without making absolutely certain he couldn’t get sick? McNulty had panicked after his attack and had made an unorthodox transfer that still shocked Tallon every time he remembered its clumsiness. He ground the cigarette under his shoe and swore to make somebody pay for the mistake when he got back to the Block. If he got back to the Block.

By a conscious effort he denied himself another cigarette. The room seemed to have grown smaller in the week he had stayed there. Hotels on Emm Luther were on the bottom of the scale as far as comfort and amenities went. His room was not inexpensive, yet it contained nothing but a bed with a smudged headboard, and a few shabby pieces of furniture. A cobweb waved forlornly from the warm air vent. The walls were a kind of bureaucrat green — the color of despair.

Sucking in air through his teeth in a hiss of disgust, Tallon returned to the window and leaned his forehead on the chill glass. He looked out across the throbbing lights of the alien city, noting the subtle effect of the higher gravity in the architecture of the towers and spires — a reminder that he was far from home.

Eighty thousand portals there were between here and Earth, representing uncountable millions of light-years; curtains of star systems, layer upon layer of them, made it impossible to pick out even the loose cluster of which Sol was a part. Too far; much too far. Loyalties were stretched too thin over those distances. Earth, the need for new portals, the Block — at this distance, what did it all mean?

Tallon suddenly realized he was hungry. He switched on a light and examined himself in the room’s single mirror. His straight black hair was slightly untidy. The long, rather serious face — which might have been that of an accountant or a jazz player with a leaning toward theory — was shaded with stubble, but he decided it was unlikely to attract attention. Momentarily and childishly pleased at the thought of eating, he ran a comb through his hair, turned off the light, and opened the door.

He was stepping out into the corridor when the first smell of danger came to him. The hotel was quiet. And now that he thought of it, no vehicle had passed along the normally busy street below his window during the whole time he had stood there.

Snuffling with panic, wiping his upper lip with the back of his hand, Tallon went back into his room and edged the window open a little. The unsteady murmur of city traffic billowed into the room on the cold air; and yet nothing was moving in the one thoroughfare immediately below. Would they go to all that trouble? He pulled his jaw sideways, frowning in thought, then realized he was deceiving himself by simulating doubt. For what he had in his memory they would seal off the city, the continent, the whole planet of Emm Luther.

It’s happening to me, he thought, but a wave of irritation submerged his fear. Why did everybody have to stick so carefully to the rules? Why was it that if somebody on your side made a mistake, somebody on their side always chopped you for it? Were they not going to make an exception, even for Sam Tallon, the center of the universe?

Moving with sudden feverish speed, he locked the door and dragged his suitcase out of the closet. There was something that should have been done earlier, and his forehead prickled at the thought of the risk he had taken by delaying so long. He took his old-style transistor radio from the case, removed its battery, and went to the mirror. Ducking his head slightly, Tallon parted the hair on his left temple and worked through it until he had isolated two silver strands. He raised the battery to his forehead, and after a moment’s hesitation, pressed the gleaming strands to its terminals.

Eyes opaque with pain, rocking slightly on his feet, Tallon slowly and clearly recited the information. It took only a few seconds for him to go through the four groups of digits. When he had finished he reversed the battery and, with a longer hesitation, made the connection again. This time it really hurt as the pea-sized capsule implanted in his brain snapped itself shut, imprisoning a fragment of the living tissue.

He put the battery back in the radio, found the metallic hairs again, and jerked them from his scalp. Tallon smiled wryly. It had been easier than he had expected. The Lutherians usually avoided killing people, partly because it was the planetary government’s official creed, but mainly because their knowledge of hypnotic techniques had advanced far enough to make it unnecessary. If he was taken, the first thing they would do would be to use a brain-brush on him to wipe out what he had learned. But now it would fail. Even if he were to be killed, the Block would find a sorrowing relative to apply for the return of his body to Earth, and the pea-sized fragment of his brain would still be alive in its beautifully engineered cocoon. The Block would be able to extract what it wanted to know.

Tallon wondered coolly if, in spite of all the assurances, a tiny frightened ghost of his own personality would still be there in that dark little cell — alive and screaming when the electrodes came blindly probing. I’m getting too pessimistic, he thought. It must be an occupational disease. Who says I’m going to die?

He took the flat, high-velocity automatic from his pocket and weighed it in his hand. The Block would expect him to use it, even though Earth and Emm Luther were not officially at war. When the capsule had been implanted in his head there had been an unwritten, unspoken clause in the agreement. With the information locked up tight, preserved independent of his own life, the Block would rather he got himself killed and shipped back home than be locked safely away in an escape-proof prison. Nobody had even hinted at the clause — he would have quite on the spot if they had; but it was there just the same. And the best way to get killed would be to start shooting at members of the E.L.S.P. Tallon unloaded the automatic, threw it in a drawer, and dropped the clip into the wastebasket.

The strings of digits he had memorized were the coordinates of the new portal, plus the jump bearing and jump increment involved, which the luck of the galactic draw had awarded to Emm Luther rather than to Earth. They represented nothing less than one brand-new Earth-type planet. He, Sam Tallon, was the possessor of perhaps the most important single secret in the universe. But he was not going to die for it — not for anything or anybody. All he owed the Block was a reasonable attempt at escaping. He lit a fresh cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed.

Somewhere in the city of New Wittenburg there was a specialist whose name and address Tallon did not know. The specialist would contact him when it was safe. His job was to administer the drug pack, the treatment, which by both physical and psychosomatic means would alter Tallon’s appearance sufficiently to get him through the check-points at the space terminal. His skin, hair, and eye pigmentation would be changed; the fingerprint patterns would be altered; even his Bertillon measurements would be changed — by drugs that produced tensions and contractions in the body’s musculature and connective tissues.

Tallon had never had the treatment before and was unhappy at the prospect, but it would be better than sinking out of sight in a Lutherian prison. If only he could leave the hotel and stay on the loose, the specialist would find him. The problem was how to get out.

He pulled deeply on his cigarette, almost allowed the smoke to escape from his mouth, then drew it back into his lungs. The excess made him dizzy. He lay back on his elbows and tried to assess his chances objectively.

With full equipment there would have been six possible ways to leave his room — the door and window, the two other walls, and the floor and ceiling — but, thanks to McNulty, he had been forced to travel without gear. The E.L.S.P. did not know that, though, which was why they had gone to the trouble of englobing him. He guessed they were at that minute covering the street outside, the corridor, and the rooms above, below, and on each side.

Apart from the useless automatic, he had nothing but a pair of thrust shoes in extremely doubtful condition. Assuming the others really were out there and not just a product of his nerves, the situation was about as hopeless as they come. The only course offering any hope at all was, as he had originally intended, to walk as calmly as possible toward the restaurant. A window at the end of the corridor looked out on a different street. If he got to that, there might be a slight chance.

But this time the door to the corridor refused to open.

Tallon twisted the handle violently and pulled with all his strength, then remembered the Block had warned him not to exert himself too much for a few hours after triggering the capsule in his head. He relaxed and backed away from the door, half expecting it to be blasted open at any second. He was caught. The only question still remaining was which of the three E.L.S.P. network executives was handling the operation. The ban on straightforward liquidation, imposed by the rigid semitheocracy that prevailed on Emm Luther, had led them to develop idiosyncratic ways of handling politically dangerous prisoners. The cardex in Tallon’s memory flicked over, unbidden, turning up their names and a summary of what was likely to happen to him “accidentally while resisting arrest.”

There was Kreuger, who liked to immobilize his captives by cutting their Achilles tendons; there was Cherkassky, who filled them so full of psychoneuro drugs that they never again had a peaceful night’s sleep; and finally there was Zepperitz. Zepperitz and his methods made the other two men seem almost benign.

Suddenly appalled by his own stupidity at ever having allowed himself to be drawn into the intelligence game, Tallon drew a chair into the center of the room and sat on it. He interlocked his hands behind his back — a neat, passive bundle — and waited. The destruction of Tallon as a political being, begun the first time he had failed to find a recognizable constellation in Emm Luther’s night sky, was complete.

He felt cold, apprehensive, and impossibly ill.