Night Walk

twenty-three

“This is your last warning. Identify yourself immediately.”

Tallon activated the communications system. “Let’s do things a little differently for once,” he said. “Why don’t you identify yourself?”

There was a silence, and when the voice spoke again it contained a faintly noticeable edge of indignation. “I will repeat this warning only once: Missiles have already been dispatched toward your position.”

“Save them,” Tallon said casually, resting his fingers on the null-space jump button. “They can’t touch me. And I repeat: I want to know your name and rank.”

Another silence. Tallon leaned back in the big chair. He knew he was being unnecessarily awkward, but those 35,000 light-years had drained him of the last vestiges of tolerance for the politico-military system in which he had spent most of his life. While waiting for a reply he programmed the Lyle Star to make a jump through null-space of only half a million miles, and held it in reserve. He had just finished when preliminary flickers of color wavered in the air in front of him, showing that communications techs somewhere were laboring to establish visual contact with his ship.

The colors brightened abruptly and flowed together to form a three- dimensional image of a hard-faced, gray-haired man in the charcoal uniform of a marshal. He was seated, and the image was so good that Tallon could see the network of tiny red veins over his cheekbones. The marshal leaned forward, with disbelief in his eyes.

“Name, please,” Tallon said determinedly, making no concessions for the effect his appearance was bound to have on the marshal.

“I don’t know who you are,” the marshal said slowly, “but you have just committed suicide. Our missiles have almost reached range coincidence. It’s too late to stop them now.”

Tallon smiled easily, enjoying a moment of megalomania; and as the proximity indicators screamed he hit the jump button. A flood of brilliance poured into his eyes, but it was only the now-familiar null-space flash. When the Lyle Star emerged in normal space again one of the vision panels was glowing fiercely with the missile bursts half a million miles away. The image of the marshal had vanished, but it wavered into apparent solidity a few seconds later. He looked amazed.

“How did you do that?”

“Name, please.”

“I am Marshal James J. Jennings, commanding the Third Echelon of the Grand Fleet of Imperial Earth.” The marshal shifted uneasily in his seat; he had the look of a man swallowing a bitter pill.

“Please listen to this carefully, Marshal; here’s what I want you to do.”

“What makes you — ”

“Please keep quiet and listen,” Tallon interrupted coldly. “I’m Sam Tallon, formerly of the Amalgamated Intelligence Agencies, and I’m piloting the Lyle Star, which was sent to Emm Luther to pick me up. You can confirm this easily enough.”

The marshal leaned to one side, listening to something that was not being transmitted through the intership hook-up. He nodded several times and turned to face Tallon.

“I have just checked on it. The Lyle Star was directed to Emm Luther, but it ran into difficulties. Someone on the ship made an open-ended jump, with Tallon aboard — which means you are lying.”

Tallon spoke angrily. “I’ve come a long way, Marshal, and I’m — ” He stopped as Jennings suddenly left his chair, disappearing from view for a few seconds, then came back.

“It’s all right, Tallon,” the marshal said with a new note of respect in his voice. “We have just managed to get a visual check on your ship. It is the Lyle Star.”

“Are you certain? I could have painted the name on it myself.”

Jennings nodded. “That’s true, but we weren’t going by the name. Don’t you know you have a complete berthing cradle and a few thousand yards of spaceport concrete with you? There are a couple of dead men in Lutheran uniforms drifting around you, too.”

Tallon had forgotten that the Lyle Star would have snatched a sizable chunk of Emm Luther into null-space inside its warp field. The instantaneous vacuum created by the ship’s departure must have caused havoc in that region of the terminal. And Helen’s body had been right on the edge of it. His need for her, which had been blurred by danger and despair, was suddenly sharp, obliterating everything else in his mind. Oh, that I were where Helen lies… .

“I must apologize to you, Tallon,” Jennings said. “A state of war has existed between Earth and Emm Luther for three days. That’s why we were so jumpy when your ship was detected so close to Earth and so far from a portal. It looked like some kind of sneak attack.”

“Don’t apologize, Marshal. Can you arrange a direct communications link with the Block? Right now?”

“I could, but it wouldn’t be secure.”

“That doesn’t matter. I have nothing private to say at the moment.”

“We are delighted that you got back, Tallon, but this is highly irregular.” The representative of the Block was a man Tallon had never seen before. His fresh skin, stubby brown hands, and casual clothes made him look like a successful small-time farmer. The background to his image was a deliberately anonymous pastel green blur.

“Irregular, but also important,” Tallon said. “Are you near the top?”

The man raised his bleak eyes for a second, and Tallon knew he was near the top. “My name is Seely. Before you say anything, Tallon, I want to remind you we are on an open circuit. I also want — ”

“Let’s stop talking about irrelevancies,” Tallon said impatiently, “and concentrate on my requirements.”

“Tallon!” Seely half-rose from his seat, then relaxed into it again. He smiled. “We will terminate this conversation right now. Obviously, you have been under a great strain, and there is a possibility you might stray on to classified subjects. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

“You mean I might make some accidental reference to the capsule in my brain? The one that still holds all the route information for getting to the new Lutheran planet?”

The ruddy brown of Seely’s cheeks changed to the color of clay. “I’m sorry you did that, Tallon. I’ll talk to you here in the Block. Marshal Jennings has been instructed to bring you in without any further delay. That’s all.”

“Marshal Jennings can’t do that,” Tallon said quickly and confidently. “Ask him what happened when he fired some of his missiles at me half an hour ago.”

Seely moved a key on his desk, cutting off the sound, and spoke silently to someone out of camera range. He switched on the sound again and turned to Tallon, his eyes wary. “I’ve been hearing some unusual reports about you, Tallon. The first indications are that your ship emerged in normal space right inside the solar system. Have you established a new portal?”

“Portals are a thing of the past, Seely. I’ve cracked the null-space astrogation problem. I can go anywhere I want without portals.”

Seely interlaced his stubby fingers and stared at Tallon over the steeple they formed. “In that case, I have no alternative but to order a complete interference blanket over all communications in the solar system until we bring you in to make your report.”

“You do that,” Tallon said pleasantly, “and you’ll never see me again. I will visit every world in the empire, starting with Emm Luther, and broadcast the method on every waveband there is.”

“How do you expect to get out? I can englobe every …” Seely hesitated.

“Every portal, I believe you were going to say,” Tallon put in, feeling a cold anger flooding through him. “You are out of date, Seely; you and the portals and the Block are all part of ancient history. From now on we are through squabbling over a handful of worlds found by pure chance. Every planet in the galaxy is open to us, and there is going to be room for everybody. Even for you and your kind, Seely — although you’ll have to change. Nobody is going to stay and play soldiers in your backyard when a hundred thousand new planets are available out there for living on.

“Now — are you going to listen to me, or do I say goodbye? I’ve wasted too much time here already.” Tallon poised his hand over the red null-space jump button. The ship had not been programmed for a controlled jump from its present position, so hitting the button could flick the Lyle Star right across the Rim; but — he felt a surge of savage pleasure — that no longer mattered.

Seely looked hunted. “All right, Tallon. What do you want?”

“Three things: An immediate cancellation of all preparations for hostilities against Emm Luther; clearance for me to broadcast details of the null-space astrogation technique to anybody who wants to use it; and I want to commandeer Marshal Jennings’ flagship for an immediate flight to Emm Luther.”

Seely opened his mouth to reply, but a new voice cut into the circuit: “Requests granted.”

Tallon recognized the voice of Caldwell Dubois, statutory representative of Earth and the four other human settlements of the solar system.

The mirrored, thousand-yard keel of the Wellington, flagship of Space Marshal Jennings, glinted frostily in the thin air high above New Wittenburg. It had become the second ship to make a controlled null-space flight and the first to do so from Earth to Emm Luther. An hour had elapsed since its powerful transmitters had sphered their message downward across the broad face of the planet.

The Wellington was too huge for even the largest berthing cradles in the New Wittenburg terminal, and so had chosen to remain aloft — though not in orbit — in a prodigious but peaceful display of sheer power. An elliptical section of its hull detached itself from the rest of the ship and drifted downward, revealing itself to be a flat-bottomed lifeboat.

Tallon stood at the lifeboat’s main view screen, watching the long single continent expand beneath him. He was still wearing the eyeset, but during the approach to Emm Luther and the subsequent broadcast, the unlimited technical resources of the Wellington’s electronics shops had fitted it with a pea-sized television camera and coded its output in accordance with Tallon’s original plan. He had his own eyes again, providing him with good, though monocular, vision. Later, he had been assured, they would be able to give him a camera built right into each eye.

The twilit continent curved away below, dull greens and ochres sifted through each other, edged with lacy white where they met the tideless ocean. Tallon could take in almost the whole of his night walk in one glance — that long straggling line leading north through invisibly fine details such as the mist-hidden Pavilion and the swamp; the city of Sweetwell and The Persian Cat; the probe factory, where he had been wounded; Carl Juste’s estate; and the mountain motel where he had spent five days with Helen — right up to the space terminal, where Helen had been shot.

At that moment he was one of the most important and celebrated men in the empire, his name was being spread from world to world, and men would remember it as long as history was written; but he had been afraid to ask for the one piece of information that mattered most.

If she’s dead, I don’t want to know, he thought, and sat unmoving, wondering at the tides of memory pounding at the walls of his consciouness, as though he had existed in this emotional matrix before, long ago, loving Helen in another life, losing her in another life.

“We’ll touch down in less than a minute,” Marshal Jennings said. “Are you ready for the ordeal?”

Tallon nodded. The space terminal was ballooning rapidly in the view screens. He could see the arrays of ships, the network of roads and crowded slideways, the space near the reception area that had been cleared for their landing. In another few seconds he made out the dark-suited figures of the official greeting party, which he had been told would include the Temporal Moderator himself. Cameramen were waiting to record his arrival for the benefit of the whole empire.

Suddenly, he recognized the pale oval of Helen’s upturned face amid the dark figures; and the turmoil in his mind subsided, leaving behind it a feeling of utter peacefulness, greater than he had ever expected to know.

“We’ll have just enough room to land and nothing over,” the lifeboat’s pilot called over his shoulder. “This place is just as crowded as they say.”

“A temporary phase,” Tallon assured him. “Things are going to be different.”

Helen’s face was turned up toward his ship. But she could also have been looking beyond him to where the stars had begun to assemble in the evening sky. Toward — he recalled the old lines — that calm Sunday that goes on and on, when even lovers find their peace at last. The final line was: “And Earth is but a star, that once had shone,” but that was something Helen and he and the rest of humanity did not have to think about..

The mother world would grow old some day, and become infertile; but by then her children would have grown up around her, tall and strong and fair. And they would be many.