Night Walk

six

Tallon positioned the sonar torch carefully on his forehead, slipped the earpiece into his right ear, and switched on. He stood up, moved his head about experimentally, and began to walk. He was suddenly aware of how much he had gotten used to feeling his way with a cane.

The range of the torch was set for five yards, which meant anything beyond that distance would produce no echo. As he advanced he moved his head first horizontally, then vertically. The latter movement produced a tone that could be compared to an inverted vee as the sonar beam, now touching the ground, approached his feet and receded again.

Tallon forced himself to walk smoothly and steadily, giving all his attention to the rising and falling electronic tone. He had covered about ten yards when he began to pick up a tiny blip near the top of each vertical scan. Still walking, but more slowly now, he concentrated on the upper part of the sweep. The blip crept higher up the tonal scale with each appearance, and finally Tallon was able to convert it into a shrill steady note by inclining his head slightly downward.

He put his hand out and touched a metal bar suspended just below eye level.

“Wonderful! That’s really wonderful!” The woman’s voice sounded young and fresh, and it took him by surprise. He turned toward it self-consciously, wondering how he looked in sloppy prison clothing, with a plastic box strapped to his forehead, then was surprised at his reaction. Apparently his male ego still considered itself in the running, undaunted by plastic buttons in place of eyes. In the sonar he picked up the slightly discordant tone produced by a human being.

“Miss Juste?”

“Yes. Dr. Winfield and Ed told me you were making excellent progress with the sonar, but I didn’t realize you had got so far with it. I’m glad I came to see for myself.”

“The work passes the time,” Tallon smiled uncertainly. He felt strangely uneasy, as though he had almost remembered something important, then let it slip away. Perhaps this would be as good a time as any to start probing her motives.

“It’s very good of you to let us do this sort of thing in view of the … climate of official opinion.”

There was silence for a few seconds, then Tallon heard the familiar sound of Winfield’s cane and Hogarth’s crutches approaching across the concrete apron they were using for the sonar trials.

“Well, Miss Juste,” Winfield said, “what did you think of that?”

“I’m very impressed. I was just saying so to Detainee Tallon. Is any more work needed on an instrument that operates so well?”

Tallon noticed her use of the word Detainee in his case, in contrast to her informal way of referring to Winfield and Hogarth. He kept the sonar beam on her, silently cursing its shortcomings. As far as the beam was concerned, there was no significant difference between a crane driver and a showgirl. He felt the first stirrings of an idea.

“The preliminary tests are just about completed,” Winfield announced proudly. “Sam and I will be wearing the sonars permanently from now on to gain experience with them. It will take a few weeks to sort out the best range selection and settle on the optimum beam width.”

“I see. Well, let me know how you get on.”

“Of course, Miss Juste. Thank you for all your kindness.”

Tallon heard her firm light steps move away; then he turned to Winfield. Distinguishing between Winfield and Hogarth with the beam was easy, because the doctor stood head and shoulders above his crippled companion. To demonstrate his increasing mastery over the sonar, Tallon touched Winfield accurately on the shoulder.

“You know, Logan, you could be making a mistake in not providing in your grand scheme for an analysis of Miss Juste’s motivation. She doesn’t strike me as the sort of girl who does things without a reason.”

“There he goes,” Hogarth grumbled. “Knows more about Miss Juste than we do, and he’s never even seen her. This boy must have been a mean card player when he had eyes.”

Tallon grinned. At first he had been disconcerted by the Hogarth’s constant and uninhibited references to his blindness; then he had realized that they were good for his sense of proportion and were uttered for that very reason.

In the afternoon Tallon and Winfield went for a walk using their sonars for guidance. They confined themselves to circuits of an unused tennis court, which was out of bounds to all but disabled prisoners. No guards questioned them about the boxes strapped to their foreheads, and Tallon guessed Helen Juste had given instructions for them to be left alone. He had noticed, too, that none of the medical staff had spoken to them about the sonar project. He asked Winfield how much influence the woman had in the administration of the Pavilion.

“I’m not sure,” Winfield replied. “I’ve heard she’s related to the Moderator himself. I’ve been told that the rehabilitation center was her own idea, and that the Moderator pulled strings to get it set up. Occupational therapy isn’t good doctrine, you know. The synod recommends prayer and fasting for intransigents such as us.”

“But would the Moderator stretch the rules that far?”

“Son, you take everything too literally. A few years in practical politics would have done you a world of good. Listen, if the head of a government orders his people to cut down on liquor because their drunkenness is ruining the country’s economy, it doesn’t mean he’s going to drink less himself. Nor would he expect his relatives and friends to change their drinking habits. That’s human nature.”

“You make it all sound so simple,” Tallon said impatiently. He decided to broach the idea that had come to him during his talk with Helen Juste. “Are you still working on your grand plan to break out of the Pavilion?”

“Son, if I can’t die on Earth, I may not die at all. Are you coming with me?”

“I’ve told you how I feel about that, but maybe I can help you.”

“How?”

“Do you think Miss Juste would get us a couple of television cameras? The peanut-size jobs used for bugging people’s apartments? They probably have them all over the prison.”

Winfield stopped walking and sank his fingers into Talion’s arm. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Yes, why not? We both have our optic nerves intact. It’s only a matter of converting the camera output to the right sort of signal and feeding it into the nerve endings. It’s a common technique on Earth.”

“But wouldn’t it involve surgery? I doubt if — ”

“No surgery needed if we beam the signal accurately through the eye. The fact that we have plastic skins on our eyes could help, because we could insert a simple X and Y plate arrangement in the plastic to keep the beam aimed at the nerve ending, regardless of eye movements.”

Winfield began to tremble with excitement. “If I could see again, and with the preparations I’ve made for the swamp, I’d be walking down the main street in Natchitoches inside a year. I know it.” His normally powerful voice sounded strangely small.

“Well, that’s the grand plan,” Tallon said. “Now we have to consider some of those petty details of mine. We’ll need the cameras and a range of microminiature components. And we’ll have to have access to the appropriate journals and an auto-reader — you’ll absorb the physiological data; I’ll do the semiconductor research.”

“But who will build the units? Ed knows nothing about that sort of work.”

“That’s another detail. You’ll have to ask Miss Juste for the use of an assembly robot — Grade 2 at least — programmed for microminiature electronics. They probably have one in their maintenance lab.”

“But, my God, Sam! Those things cost over half a million.”

“Ask her anyway. She’ll arrange it for you. Remember, she likes the color of your eyes.”

Tallon stood for a moment, face turned toward the hot white sun of Emm Luther, experiencing a rare moment of certitude.

A week later two guards dragged the assembly robot into the center’s workshop on a negative-gravity sled.

Tallon had spent most of the week practicing with his sonar and, between times, trying to understand what had happened to him the first day he had spoken to Helen Juste. A psychic explosion, a violent upheaval in his subconscious — and for no reason at all. He ruled out all the vaguely para-normal phenomena sometimes associated with romantic love, partly out of natural skepticism, partly because he had never even seen her. Hogarth had described her as a spindly redhead with orange eyes, so she did not seem the sort of woman who might have a deeply disturbing effect on him or on any other man. And even had she been a raven-haired myth-woman, there was no real explanation for the abrupt shift in his perception by which he had known she would let them have the equipment. As he lay in his cell each night, awaiting the pale light of dreams, he returned to the problem again and again, trying to wrest some significance from it.

But once the robot was installed and the work of writing its program begun, Tallon found himself with nothing on his mind but the project. Winfield and he spent weeks in which every waking hour, apart from mealtimes and the compulsory prayer sessions, was spent in the prison library, listening to auto-readers. Most of the available journals were out of date, because their importation from Earth bad never been encouraged by the Lutheran government and, in recent years, had been practically banned by Earth. The latter move was a sign of the deterioration in relations between the two since the brand-new planet of Aitch Mühlenberg had dropped into Emm Luther’s lap; but the information was there just the same.

As he worked on it Tallon felt his mind sink through the layers the years had superimposed on his personality. A younger Sam Tallon emerged, one who had been determined to carve out a career in domain physics, until some unremembered event had diverted him into world-hopping, and then finally to the Block and all it represented. The contentment Tallon experienced was so profound, he began to suspect that a subconscious drive toward it had been his real motivation for initiating the artificial-eye project — not the desire to regain his own sight - or help Winfield, but a powerful need to re-create himself as he was … when? And why should a single encounter with Helen Juste have triggered the impulse? He had no memories of any girl with red hair and unusual eyes who might have been a proto-Helen.

As the computer program took shape they put the assembly robot to work on two identical prototypes of what, for lack of inspiration, they named eyesets. Supplementing the program, with its own vast store of instructions built into it for microminiature electronics, the robot slowly assembled two pairs of spectacles in the vacuum-locked privacy of its sterile belly. They were conventional in appearance, except for the beads that were the television cameras mounted on the bridge pieces. The rims served to direct the microwaves back into the eyes.

The only problem Tallon and Winfield had to handle themselves — through Ed Hogarth’s hands — was that of keeping the beams focused accurately on the optic nerve. They solved it by an adaption of Tallon’s original plan — a single metal plug at the edge of each plastic iris. The theory was that every eye movement would bring the metal plug to a new position in a weak magnetic field generated inside the spectacle frame, thus providing reference data for a single-crystal computer, which redirected the beams accordingly.

By the time he had reached the final part of the program, which dealt with the circuitry for the infinitely more subtle language of the glial cells, Tallon was wholly committed to the intellectual adventure. He scarcely touched his meals and was losing weight steadily.

The month-long reverie came to an end one afternoon as he lay in the sound-cone of an auto-reader.

He recognized Winfield’s approach by the quick, nervous tapping of the cane, which the old man still used in conjunction with the sonar torch.

“I’ve got to speak to you right away, son. Sorry to interrupt, but it’s important.” Winfield’s voice was hoarse with urgency.

“It’s all right, Doc. What’s the trouble?” Tallon swung his legs from the couch and rolled out of the sound area.

“The trouble is Cherkassky. The grapevine says he’s out of the hospital.”

“What of it? He can’t touch me in here.”

“That’s the point, son. They say he still isn’t fit for normal duty, but he has arranged to join the Pavilion staff for a ‘working convalescence.’ You know what that means, don’t you? You know why he’s coming here?”

Of their own accord, Tallon’s hands rose to his face, and the finger tips gently traced the curve of his unseeing, plastic eyes. “Yes, Doc,” he said quietly. “Thanks for telling me. I know why he’s coming here.”