Night Walk

five

The daily routine at the Pavilion, as explained to Tallon, was a simple one — simpler for him than for the other prisoners, for he was excused from all activities except the three daily prayer sessions. As far as he could tell, the Pavilion was more like an army training camp than a prison. The inmates worked seven hours a day at a variety of menial jobs, with a minimum of regimentation, and had a library and sports facilities. In a way it was quite a pleasant place to be, except that there was only one sentence — life.

Taken to the exercise ground on his first day out of the medical block, Tallon settled on the ground with his back to a sun-warmed wall. It was a calm morning, with almost no breeze, and the prison yard was filled with overlapping layers of sound — footsteps, voices, and other noises still to be identified — and beyond them, the audible movement of he sea. Tallon leaned his head back on the warm stones and tried to make himself comfortable.

“You’re on your own now, Tallon,” the guard said. The others will show you where everything is. Have fun.”

“How can I miss?”

The guard laughed sardonically and moved away. His footsteps had barely faded when Tallon felt something flick lightly against his outstretched leg. He froze, trying to remember if the southern part of the continent had any particularly unpleasant insects.

“Excuse me, sir. You are Mr. Sam Tallon?” The voice carried with it the image of a white-haired, red-faced, backwoods politician.

“That’s right.” Tallon brushed uneasily at his leg, but felt nothing unusual. “Sam Tallon.”

“A great pleasure to meet you, Sam.” The newcomer sat down beside Tallon, grunting fiercely in the process. “I’m Logan Winfield. You’re quite a hero here in the Pavilion, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Oh, yes. None of us here have any great regard for Mr. Lorin Cherkassky,” Winfield boomed, “but neither had we the enterprise to send him into the hospital for an extended stay.”

“I wasn’t trying to hospitalize him. I meant to kill him.”

“A laudable ambition, son. What a pity you didn’t succeed. However, your endeavor has made every man in the prison your friend for life; that’s how long you’re in for, I take it.”

“I guess so.”

“You guess correctly, son. One of the great benefits of mixing Lutheranism, of the variety we have here, with government is that it simplifies the procedure for dealing with politicos. The theory appears to be that as we have cheerfully condemned ourselves to everlasting torment in the hereafter by our own actions, we will hardly even notice a mortal lifetime in prison.”

“A neat theory. What are you in for?” Tallon asked out of politeness, but all he really wanted to do was to sit in the sun and doze. He had discovered he could still dream, and in dreams his brown plastic eyes were as good as real eyes.

“I’m a doctor of medicine. I came here from Louisiana when this planet was first reached. It wasn’t called Emm Luther in those days, of course. I put a lifetime of hard work into this world, and I love it. So when it broke away from the empire I worked to bring it back to its true destiny.”

Tallon snorted with bitter amusement. “I take it that when you get down to the practical details of working to bring a world back to its true destiny, the job includes getting rid of obstinate politicians?”

“Well, son, we had a saying back home that you can’t reason a man out of something he hasn’t been reasoned into. So …”

“So you’re in prison doing life for something that would have got you the same sentence, or worse, under any other political regime.” Tallon spoke angrily, and there was a long silence when he had finished. An insect hummed near his face, then drifted away in the warm air.

“I’m surprised to hear you speak like that, son. I thought we’d have common interests, but I fear I’ve intruded. I’ll go.”

Tallon nodded and listened as Winfield struggled heavily to his feet. Again something flicked lightly against his leg. This time he grabbed for it and found himself holding the end of a cane.

“My apologies,” Winfield said. “The cane is an ancient device for the members of our fraternity, but it is undeniably useful. Without it I would have fallen over your legs, with consequent embarrassment to both parties.”

A few seconds passed before Tallon absorbed the full meaning of the other man’s rounded, rolling phrases.

“Hold on a minute, Do you mean that you’re — ?”

” Blind is the word, son. You get used to saying it after a few years.”

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I didn’t know. Please sit down again.” Tallon’s hand found the man’s arm and held on. Winfield seemed to consider the idea; then he sat down, again with furious grunting. Tallon guessed he was very fat and out of condition. He found Winfield’s pomposity irritating, especially his use of the word son, but here was a man who had already explored the road Tallon was destined to walk. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the rhythmic crunch of gravel as the rest of the prisoners exercised in another part of the yard.

“I expect you’re wondering if I lost my sight in the same manner as you,” Winfield finally said.

“Well, yes.”

“No, son. Nothing quite so dramatic. Eight years ago I tried to escape from this place- with the idea of working my way back to Earth. I got as far as the swamp. That’s the easy part, of course; anybody can reach the swamp. It’s getting to the other side that counts. There’s a rather nasty species of chigger out there. The gravid females go for your eyes. When the guards brought me back to the Pavilion I was well on the way to having a nest of the brutes breeding in each eye.

“Dr. Heck had quite a job to keep them from going a through to the brain. He was deliriously happy for nearly a week — whistled Gilbert and Sullivan the whole time.”

Tallon was appalled. “But what were you hoping to do supposing you had managed to get through the swamp? The space terminal at New Wittenburg is a thousand miles from here, and even if it were only a thousand yards away, you could never have passed through the checkpoints.”

“Son,” Winfield sounded sad, “your mind is too preoccupied with details. I admire a man who has an eye for detail, but not if he lets it negate his attitude to the master plan.”

“Plan! What plan? All you had was a crazy notion you could get up and walk a few light-centuries back to Louisiana.”

“Progress is the history of crazy notions, Sam. Supraluctic flight itself was a crazy notion till somebody made it work. I can’t believe you are prepared to rot in this place for the rest of your life.”

“I may not be prepared for it, but I’m going to do it.”

“Even if I offered to take you with me next time?” Winfield’s voice had sunk to a whisper.

Tallon laughed aloud for the first time since the morning McNulty had limped into his office and handed him a piece of paper containing the cosmic address of a new planet. “Go away, old man,” he said. “You really had me going for a minute. Now I want to rest my ears.”

Winfield kept talking. “It’s going to be entirely different next time. I was unprepared for the swamp before, but I’ve been getting ready for it for eight years. I assure you, I know how to get through.”

“But you’re blind! You’d have trouble crossing a children’s playground.”

“Blind,” Winfield said mysteriously, “but not blind.”

“Talking,” Tallon replied in similar tones, “but not talking sense.”

“Listen to this, son.” Winfield moved closer until his breath was brushing Tallon’s ear. He smelled of bread and butter. “You’ve had training in electronics. You know that back on Earth, and on most other worlds, too, a blind person can get many kinds of aids.”

“That’s a different case, isn’t it, Doc? Emm Luther’s electronics industry is part and parcel of its space-probe program. Every electronics specialist on the planet works on the program or on associated priority projects, or else is away on this new planet they’ve found. Besides, the Temporal Moderator has ruled that it’s against the creed to join man-made parts to bodies fashioned in the Divine Image. The gadgets you’re talking about simply don’t exist in this part of the galaxy.”

“But they do,” Winfield said triumphantly. “Or they almost do. I’m building a primitive sonar torch in the prison rehabilitation center. At least, Ed Hogarth, who runs the center’s workshop, is building it under my direction. I can’t do the actual work myself, naturally.”

Tallon sighed resignedly. It looked as though Winfield’s conversation was made up of absurd statements and fantasy.

“You mean they don’t watch you in there? Don’t they mind that two of the government’s strictest injunctions are being broken with government equipment in a government establishment?”

Winfield rose noisily to his feet. “Son, you have an unfortunate skeptical attitude, but I’m going to assume that in less trying circumstances you are capable of civilized behavior. Come with me.”

“Where?”

“To the workshop. You have one or two surprises in store.”

Holding on to Winfield’s plump arm, Tallon followed him from the quadrangle, aware that his curiosity was aroused as he had never expected it to be again. Winfield moved confidently and quite quickly, tapping with his cane. As they walked a succession of men touched TalIon’s arm in sympathetic greeting, and one pushed a pack of cigarettes into his free hand. He struggled to keep his head up and walk boldly, but it was almost impossible, and he could, feel the fixed apologetic smile of a sightless man engraving itself on his face.

To reach the workshop of the rehabilitation center they had to pass the main prison building and walk two hundred yards to an auxiliary block. During the walk Winfield explained that his torch generated a narrow beam of inaudible high-frequency sound and had a receiver to pick up the echoes; an electronic device combined the outgoing and returning sounds. The idea was that the sound generator would sweep repeatedly from about 80 to 40 kilocycles a second, so that at any instant the outgoing signal would be at a slightly lower frequency than any of the echoes. Combining the two would produce a beat frequency proportional to the distance of any object in the torch’s beam and thus allow a blind man to build up a picture of his surroundings.

Winfield had partly worked out the theory, and partly remembered it from articles in old technomedical journals. Ed Hogarth, who apparently was a compulsive gadgeteer, had built him a prototype, but was having trouble with the electronics of the frequency-reduction stage, which should have rendered the high-pitched beats audible to the human ear.

As he listened, Tallon felt a growing respect for the old doctor, who seemed genuinely incapable of accepting defeat. They reached the rehabilitation center and stopped at the entrance.

“Just one thing before we go in, son. I want you to promise not to say anything to Ed about the real reason why I want the torch built. If he guessed, he would quit work on it immediately — to save me from myself, as the saying goes.”

Tallon said, “All right, but I want you to make me one promise in return. If you really do have an escape plan, don’t include me in it. If I ever decide to commit suicide I’ll pick an easier way.”

They went up a flight of stairs and into the workshop. Tallon identified it at once by the familiar smell of hot solder and stale cigarette smoke, a smell that had not changed since his student days.

“Are you there, Ed?” The echoes from Winfieid’s voice suggested the workshop was quite small. “I’ve brought a visitor.”

“I know you’ve brought a visitor,” a thin, irritable voice said from close by. “I can see him, can’t I? You’ve been blind so long you’ve begun to think nobody else can see.” The voice faded into barely audible swearing.

Winfield gave his booming laugh and whispered to Tallon, “Ed was born on this planet, but he was very active in the old Unionist movement at one time and didn’t have enough sense to quit when the Lutherians took over. He was arrested by Kreuger and suffered an unfortunate accident to his heels while trying to get free. There are quite a few of Kreuger’s prizes hopping about the Pavilion like birds.”

“And my ears are all right, too,” Hogarth’s voice warned.

“Ed, this is Sam Tallon — the man who almost finished Cherkassky. He’s an electronics expert, so perhaps you’ll get my torch working now.”

“I have a degree in electronics,” Tallon said. “That isn’t the same as being an expert.”

“But you’ll be able to get the bugs out of a simple frequency-reducer circuit,” Winfield said. “Here, feel this.”

He drew Tallon over to a bench and placed his hands on a complicated metal and plastic object about three feet square.

“Is that it?” Tallon explored the massive circuitry with his fingers. “What good is this thing to you? I thought you were talking about something you could carry in one hand.”

“It’s a model,” Hogarth snapped impatiently, “twenty times the size of the real instrument. That lets the doctor feel out what he thinks he’s doing, and I reproduce it in proper size. It’s a good idea, except it doesn’t work.”

“It’ll work now,” Winfield said confidently. “What do you say, son?”

Tallon thought it over. Winfield seemed to be a crazy old coot, and in all probability Hogarth was another, but in the brief time he had spent with them, he had almost forgotten about being blind. “I’ll help,” he said. “Have you materials to build two prototypes?”

Winfield squeezed his hand excitedly. “Don’t worry about that part, son. Helen will see we get all the parts we need.”

“Helen?”

“Yes. Helen Juste. She’s head of the rehabilitation center.”

“And she doesn’t object to your building this thing?”

“Object!” Winfield roared. “It was mainly her idea. She’s been behind the scheme from the start.”

Tallon shook his head in disbelief. “Isn’t that a strange thing for a senior government officer to do? Why should she risk appearing before the doctrinal synod just to help you?”

“There you go again, son — letting your concern for petty detail hinder the grand scheme. How should I know why she does it? Perhaps she likes my eyes; Dr. Heck tells me they’re a rather pretty shade of blue. Of course he’s prejudiced, since he made them himself.”

Both Winfield and Hogarth laughed extravagantly. Tallon put his hands on the blocky shape of the frequency-reducer model, where he could feel sunlight warming his skin. All his preconceived notions had been wrong. The life of a blind man was proving to be neither dull nor simple.