Night Walk

twenty-two

Tallon had forgotten there were no lights shining in the cargo hold. He found the lighting panel on the control deck and clicked on every tube in the ship, but even with the eyeset at full gain he picked up nothing. This, he concluded, was because there was too much screening between him and the rat, or because the rat was hiding beyond the reach of light. Either or both of these factors had prevented him from discovering the animal before it came forward in search of food.

He went out of the control room and along the central corridor. Standing at the handrail of the transverse catwalk he detected something, not so much a glimmer of light as a slight lessening of darkness. It was a new type of problem. He had not only to adjust to having his eyes separated from his body, but also to deduce exactly where his eyes were, from very slender clues.

The rat was probably somewhere in the bales of protein plant, but remembering how quickly it had vanished when he’d grabbed for it in the galley, Tallon felt there was no point in shifting the cargo. He decided to set a nonlethal trap.

There was the old trick of upending a box, tilting it with a short stick propped under one side, and jerking the support away when the quarry was underneath. He changed his mind about it when he recalled a boyhood experiment that had resulted in an unexpectedly speedy mouse being flattened by an edge of the box. In the present circumstances, the rat, which had probably crept aboard at Parane, was more valuable than a champion racehorse.

Tallon took some bread from the galley, put it down near the bales of cargo, and lay down close by. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. As the minutes dragged by he found himself dozing off. He fought it determinedly for a while; then he began to notice a gradual increase in brightness. There was a shifting of dim planes, areas of patchy grayness emerged from the darkness, followed by an irregular area of brightness like the mouth of a cave. A huge shape stirred near by, frighteningly; red eyes gleamed, speculatively and coldly. Tallon kept his breathing steady. He knew that his rat had merely passed close to another rat on its way out of their lair.

Quite suddenly he could see bright metal floor plates from close up, stretching away toward dark horizons like a lifeless desert. There was an alien sky above, a suggestion of cavernous vastness. The interior of the hold, as viewed by a rat, was an alien and unfriendly universe in which the natural instinct was to run for the safety of dark corners, for the solace of red-eyed mates in the black caves.

Tallon wondered, uneasily, if the eyeset might be a more effective receiver than he had imagined. What if there were a link-up between the signals fed to the visual cortex and the other mental processes of the animal or person concerned, a kind of emotional overlap? Perhaps if he tuned in on a bull that was looking at a waving cloth he would pick up undertones of anger. Perhaps using Cherkassky’s eyes had made him a ruthless killer, an instrument that turned the little man’s own feral instincts back on himself in a new manifestation of poetic justice. In that case, had Helen’s eyes brought him love?

Absorbed with this idea, Tallon barely noticed the little mound of bread come into view as the rat neared it. The mound got nearer, became a tumbled mountainside of food; then his own gigantic, bearded, dreaming face loomed on the threatening horizon. The scene froze for a long time, and Tallon forced himself to remain motionless. Finally the rat began to advance again. Tallon waited until the glistening cellular structure of the bread was very close before springing forward. Seen through the rat’s eyes, his attempt to snatch it was almost laughable.

At the first movement of the slumbering giant’s tree-trunk fingers everything blurred, and he was back in the half-world of dimly seen shapes. He tried three more times, with the same result, before admitting to himself that he would have to find a better way. What happens, he thought, if I can’t catch it? The tableau becomes even more ridiculous. In the metal bubble of light and air a man with plastic eyes crawls in endless pursuit of a rodent, never catching it because the only time he can see it is when it sees him… .

“If a good swordsman challenges you to a duel,” Tallon said aloud, “you insist on fighting with pistols.”

The sound of his voice in the lonely stillness of the ship reminded him that he was, after all, a human being, a member of the species whose special weapon was thought, something it was disturbingly easy to forget while his eyes crept in darkness under the cargo.

He picked up the bread and carried it forward, setting it on the plates at the end of the control-deck corridor. He stopped for a moment in the galley, then went on into the control room and sat down. This time Tallon waited until the rat was nose-deep in the mountain of food before he made his move.

He switched off the artificial gravity.

As the struggling, shrilling rat floated into the air Tallon swam toward it, ready with a transparent plastic jar taken from the galley. At the sight of him the rat became frantic, whipping its body about in the air like a landed fish, presenting Tallon — who got only fragmentary, whirling glimpses of himself — with a delicate problem in ballistics. On the second attempt he scooped up the writhing animal, put the lid loosely back on the jar, and moved forward again, smiling slightly as the plastic container vibrated in his hand.

The first thing Tallon did with his new eyes was to instruct the Lyle Star to find out where it was.

It took the astrogation complex only a few seconds to take crude bearings from the other seventeen galaxies of the home cluster, then refine and confirm its findings with quasar readings. The ship was about 10,000 light-years from the galactic center, and about 35,000 light-years from Earth. Tallon was a hardened star tramp, but it was difficult to look at the glowing figures hanging in the air above the computer without an icy sense of dismay. The distance across which he hoped to pick his way was so great that the light from Sol could not reach him; it would have been absorbed by interstellar dust on the way. But if there were no dust, and if he had a telescope of unlimited power and resolution, he could have looked at Earth and seen Upper Paleolithic men beginning to assert supremacy over the forests of Earth, proudly carrying their newly perfected weapons of flint.

Tallon tried to visualize himself successfully crossing that unimaginable void — seated in the big chair, plastic button eyes blind to the flowing starscapes, a captive rat blinking malevolently in a plastic jar on Tallon’s knees — guided only by an idea born in blindness in his own mind and now spinning endlessly in the brain cells of a computer.

Fantastic as the vision was, he had to go ahead and try.

To build his model of the space routes, Tallon transferred the position of every portal, expressed as absolute coordinates, into the computer’s working volume and converted them to coordinates based on the Lyle Star’s present position. This took some time, but it gave him a map that was the normal-space equivalent of the one he already had of null-space. He then plugged the module containing the latter back into the main facility and programmed it to find the correspondence, if any existed. There was also the possibility that there was a genuine correspondence so attenuated that it would be found only by one of the planet-wide computer networks such as existed on Earth, but he refused to dwell on that.

An hour later the computer chimed softly and a set of equations was born in the air above it, the glowing symbols hanging silently over its solution projector. There was no necessity for Tallon to understand it — the astrogation complex was capable of absorbing and acting on the information by itself — but he had a natural interest in seeing for himself what could very well be the mathematical touchstone that would convert null-space lead to normal-space gold.

For a moment the equations looked completely incomprehensible, as though he were taking them in with not only a rat’s eyes but a rat’s brain as well. He stared at the figures, holding the plastic jar up in front of them, then they seemed to shift into focus as his dormant mathematical facilities were stirred into activity. Tallon recognized the elements of a four-dimensional wave surface, the quartic, and suddenly realized he was looking at an incomplete and camouflaged definition of a Kummer surface. That meant null-space was analogous to a second-degree singularity surface — a knobbly interconnected entity, with sixteen real nodes and as many double tangent planes. No wonder then that, with a negligible sample of referent points, the years of research into null-space astrogation had got precisely nowhere.

Tallon smiled. If he got out of his present situation, and it turned out that the nineteenth-century German mathematician Ernst Kummer had been a Lutheran, there would be a beautiful piece of irony involved.

Tallon reconnected the astrogation complex and the null-space drive unit, and punched in the coordinates and jump increment for what he hoped would be the first controlled flight in the history of interstellar travel. He took off the eyeset, to avoid a prolonged blast of light, and hurled the ship into the null-space continuum for the eight seconds demanded by the new equations.

When he put the eyeset on again he sat and sweated for a moment before lifting the rat up to where it could see the position report of the astrogation complex. It presented a long string of absolute coordinates that Tallon was too agitated to comprehend. He instructed the computer to reduce the information to give a single, simple figure: the geodesic distance between the Lyle Star and Earth.

The new answer was just short of a hundred light-years.

Assuming he had not made a lucky random jump, that would mean an error of only one third of a percent of the total distance.

Trembling slightly, in a manner unbecoming to the conqueror of null-space, Tallon programmed the next jump and carried it out. This time when he put on the eyeset there was a sharp bright star glowing ahead. The computer said less than half a light-year.

Tallon cheered unashamedly and squeezed the plastic jar, wishing he could convey to its uncomprehending inmate that the shining jewel in front of them was the sun that had lighted the way for both their ancestors to crawl out of the sea, and that their breathing bodies had been created from its abundant energy, that it represented everything summed up in the word “home.” Never mind, he thought, no doubt you and that other rat back there are thinking things I’ll never be able to understand either.

He made another jump, aware that this could be the last before going over to ion drive. When it was completed, Tallon raised the eyeset, knowing that he must be well into the solar system, possibly within sight of Earth itself.

Before he could settle the eyeset on the bridge of his nose, the raucous note of an alarm hooter blasted through the control room.

“Identify yourself immediately,” a harsh voice crackled from the external communications system. “Reply at once, or you will be destroyed by missiles that have already been launched toward your position.” The voice went on, repeating the message in the other major languages of the empire.

Tallon sighed wearily. He had crossed half the galaxy; and now he knew, beyond all doubt, that he had reached home.