Authors: Bob Shaw
Night Walk (2 page)
The eight successful probes of that first century established zigzagging
trade lanes, which the manned ships that came afterward were very careful
to follow closely. That is the other aspect of null-space travel that
troubles you as you wait for the relays to act. Although it was a logical
deduction from the absence of reciprocity in null-space, a few pioneers
discovered the hard way that jumping from a point near A will not take you
to a corresponding point near B. Get more than about two light-seconds
from the established jumping-off point, the so-called portal, and you
are off on your own random pilgrimage to the far side of eternity.
That is why, during the final slow seconds as you float in your G-cell
and breathe the rubber-smelling air, you pray and you sweat.
That is also why the planet Emm Luther, formerly a colony of Earth and
now autonomous, jealously guarded the few strings of figures locked
in Sam Tallon's brain. Emm Luther had only a single continent, and her
devouring need for new breathing space equaled that of Earth itself. She
had one incredible stroke of luck in a probe that found a green planet
only four hundred portals out and less than two thousand back.
All she needed was time to consolidate her hold there
before the big ships -- the invincible sperm of Earth's
ceaseless self-multiplication-- -- could storm the new and fertile womb.
three
Tallon did not have long to wait.
His first realization that he was under attack came when he found himself
dancing with Myra, a girl who had died back on Earth twenty years earlier.
No, he whispered,
I don't want this
. But she was there in his arms as
they slowly gyrated in the varicolored dimness of the Stardust Room. He
tried to feel the hard pressure of the chair in the dingy hotel room on
Emm Luther, but the effort seemed pointless, for that was part of a future
which was still a long way off.
Suddenly he was very much younger, still working for his degree in
electronics, and he was holding Myra. It was all
real
. His eyes filled
gratefully with the sight of her massive helmet of auburn hair, her
whiskey-colored eyes. They moved slowly and contentedly to the sound of
the music, with Myra, as always, a fraction behind the beat. She never
could dance very well, he thought warmly, but there would be lots of time
to work on it after they were married. In the meantime it was enough to
drift on and on through pastel mists and star-shot twilight.
The ballroom tilted ponderously away. Another time, another place. He was
sitting in the comfortable old bar of the Berkeley, waiting for her. Oases
of orange light reflecting on paneled walls of rich dark wood. She was
taking far too long, and he grew angry. Myra knew where he was waiting,
so if she couldn't keep the date she could at least ring him. Probably
starting to take too much for granted, expecting him to go all the way out
to her place to see what was wrong. Well, he would teach her a lesson.
He began to drink determinedly, vindictively -- and the horror was growing,
spreading like a dark stain in spite of his frantic efforts to stop it.
Next morning. The drowsy quietness of the standards lab. The newspaper
spread on the cigarette-scarred bench and, incredibly, Myra's face looking
up at him from the matte plastic sheets. Her father, a sad, mumbling giant
who had been deserted years before by Myra's mother, had smothered Myra
with a pillow, then opened his wrists with a portable circular saw.
Dissolving colors, the searching tides of grief, again the music, and they
were dancing; but this time Myra was dragging far behind the slow rhythms.
She was limp and heavy. He fought to hold her up, and her breath sobbed
and gurgled in his ear. . . .
Tallon screamed and clamped his fingers on the greasy arms of the chair.
"Here he comes," a voice said. "Romantic little fellow, isn't he?
You never can tell just by looking at them." Somebody laughed quietly.
Tallon opened his eyes. The room was filled with men in the gray whipcords
of the E.L.S.P. civil security force. They carried small arms, most of them
with the fan-shaped snouts of hornet guns, but he noticed several circular
muzzles belonging to a more traditional type of weapon. Their faces were
amused, derisive, some of them still indented with faint pink lines left
by the masks that had protected them from the psychoneuro gas.
His stomach was erupting noisily at every breath, but Tallon found the
physical nausea unimportant compared with the emotional turmoil still
rocking his senses. The psychic shock was mingled with an intolerable
feeling of outrage, of having been invaded, slit open, and pinned to a
dissecting board like a laboratory specimen.
Myra, my love . . .
I'm sorry.
Oh, you bastards, you grinning, stinking --
He tensed for a moment, ready to dive forward, then realized he was
reacting exactly as expected. This was why they had used an LSD derivative
instead of a simple knockout gas. Tallon made himself relax; he could
take anything Kreuger, Cherkassky, or Zepperitz could hand out, and
he would prove it. He would live on, in one reasonably healthy piece,
even if it was only to read every book in some prison library.
"Very good, Tallon," a voice said. "Self-control is so important in your
profession." The speaker moved into Tallon's line of vision. He was a
dry, thin-faced man, wearing the black coat and white dog collar of an
Emm Lutherian government official. Tallon recognized the narrow face,
the vertically wrinkled neck, and the incongruously lush wavy hair of
Lorin Cherkassky, number two man in the security executive's hierarchy.
Tallon nodded impassively. "Good evening. I wondered -- "
"Just keep it shut," interrupted a chunky-shouldered blond who wore
sergeant's chevrons.
"It's all right, Sergeant." Cherkassky waved the younger man aside.
"We mustn't discourage Mr. Tallon from being communicative. He may be
expected to tell us quite a lot during the next few days."
"I'll be glad to tell you all I know, of course," Tallon said quickly.
"What's the point of trying to hold on to it?"
"Precisely!" Cherkassky's voice was an excited yelp, reminding Tallon of
the little man's notorious instability. "What's the point? I'm glad you
see it that way. Now, Mr. Tallon, will you answer one question right away?"
"What is it? Yes."
Cherkassky walked to the chest of drawers, his head making peacocklike
movements on the long neck at every step, and took out the empty automatic
pistol. "Where is the ammunition for this weapon?"
"In there. I threw it in the wastebasket."
"I see," Cherkassky said, stooping to retrieve the clip. "You hid it in
the wastebasket."
Tallon shifted uneasily on the seat. This was too childish to be true.
"I dropped it in the wastebasket. I didn't want it. I didn't want any
trouble." He kept his voice low and flat.
Cherkassky nodded sympathetically. "That's what I would say if I were in
your position. Yes, that's about the best thing you could say." He slid
the clip into the pistol butt and handed it to the sergeant. "Don't lose
this, Sergeant. It's evidence."
Tallon opened his mouth to speak, then closed it abruptly. The very
childishness of the proceedings was an important part of the technique.
There is nothing more galling, more frustrating, than being forced to
act like an adult when everybody around you is behaving like a malicious
juvenile. But he was going to take it all, without cracking.
There was a long silence during which Cherkassky watched him intently.
Tallon sat perfectly motionless, trying to subdue occasional gusts of
brilliant memory shards, pictures of Myra still alive, pale skin,
whiskey-colored eyes. He became aware of the seat cutting into the
backs of his legs and wondered if any movement on his part would bring
the multiple impact of a hornet gun. Most authorities regarded it as a
humane weapon, but Tallon had once accidentally stopped a full charge of
the tiny drug-laden darts, and the ensuing paralysis had caused thirty
minutes of agony.
As the silence stretched into minutes, without any preparations being made
to remove him from the hotel, Tallon began to worry. He looked around the
room, trying to find a clue, but the faces of the E.L.S.P. men remained
professionally impassive. Cherkassky pottered around contentedly, smiling
and shrinking back against the wall each time he met Tallon's eyes.
Tallon became aware of a peculiar sensation involving the skin of his
forehead and cheeks, an icy feeling combined with waves of pinpricks
passing across the individual pores. I've graduated, he thought; I'm
having my first cold sweat.
Seconds later the door was bumped open, and a uniformed man came in
carrying a heavy box of gray metal. He set it on a chair, glanced
briefly at Tallon, and left. Cherkassky snapped his fingers, and the
blond sergeant opened the box, revealing a control panel and coiled
leads on plastic reels. In a shallow tray, the ten circular terminals
of a brain-brush headset gleamed like tawdry jewelry.
"Now, Tallon -- time for a little editing." Cherkassky's powdery face
had become businesslike.
"Here? In the hotel?"
"Why not? The longer you have the information in your head, the greater
chance you have of transferring it to someone else."
"But it takes a trained psychologist to isolate any specific sequence of
thoughts," Tallon protested. "You're likely to blot out whole areas of
my memory that have nothing to -- " He stopped as Cherkassky's head began
to make little self-satisfied swaying movements on the turkey neck. Tallon
swore silently at himself. He had intended to take it all without a word,
absorb anything they could hand out -- but he had begun to squeal before
they had even touched him. So much for the short and spectacular career
of Iron Man Tallon. He compressed his lips and sat staring straight ahead
as Cherkassky positioned the linked terminals on his head. The sergeant
gave a signal, and the encircling wall of gray uniforms retreated into
the corridor, making the room suddenly bigger and colder. In the dismal
light the single cobweb still waved inanely from the warm-air vent.
Cherkassky stood beside the chair that held the gray box, stooping slightly
to make adjustments on the verniers. He ran his eyes over the dials and
glanced up at Tallon's face.
"Did you know, Tallon, that your basal resistance is abnormally low?
Perhaps you perspire easily; that always lowers the skin resistance.
You aren't a sweaty person, are you?" Cherkassky's nose wrinkled in
distaste, and the sergeant chuckled quietly.
Tallon scowled past him toward the window. It had misted over during the time
the room was crowded, and the few city lights that were visible looked like
balls of illuminated cotton. He longed to be outside, breathing the sharp
starry air. Myra had liked walking on frosty nights. . . .
"Mr. Tallon wants us to stop wasting time," Cherkassky said severely.
"He's right, of course. Let's get down to business. Now, Tallon, just
so that there are absolutely no misconceptions on either side -- you
are in your present predicament because you are part of an intelligence
network that by pure chance obtained details of portal coordinates, jump
increment, and jump bearings of the planet Aitch Mühlenberg, a territorial
acquisition of the revered government of Emm Luther. The information
was transferred to you, and you have committed it to memory. Correct?"
Tallon nodded compliantly, wondering if the brain-brush would be as
unpleasant as the capsule. Cherkassky picked up the remote control
and poised his thumb over the red button. It dawned on Tallon that the
instrument being used on him was a standard model, the same model as used
by less reputable psychiatrists. He began to wonder just how unofficial
his present treatment was. On Emm Luther, with its single continent run
by a single world government, there had never been any need to develop
the huge, highly organized intelligence and counterespionage agencies
that still proliferated on Earth. For this reason the three Lutherian
network executives were given an almost free hand, like contractors on any
normal government undertaking, but they were answerable to the Temporal
Moderator, the planet's equivalent of a president. The question was, how
far was a man like Cherkassky allowed to indulge his own idiosyncrasies?
"All right, then," Cherkassky said. "We want you to focus your thoughts
on the information. Try to get it nice and clean. And don't try to fool
us by thinking about something else; we will be checking. I will raise my
hand when I'm going to erase, which will be about five seconds from now."
Tallon worked to marshal the strings of figures, all at once desperately
afraid of losing his own name. Cherkassky's hand made a preliminary
movement, and Tallon fought down his panic as the figures refused to flow
properly, even with his Block-trained memory, then nothing. The numerals
that would have given Earth a whole new world were gone. There had been
no pain, no sound, no sensation of any kind, but the vital fragment of
knowledge was no longer his. As the expectation of pain faded Tallon
relaxed a little.
"That wasn't too horrible, was it?" Cherkassky smoothed the thick crown
of glossy hair, which seemed to thrive like a parasite at the expense
of his frail, dry body. "Quite painless, I'm told."
"I didn't feel anything," Tallon conceded.
"But the information has been erased?"
"Yes. It's gone."
"Astonishing!" Cherkassky's voice became conversational. "I never fail
to be astonished at what this little box of tricks can do. You know,
it makes libraries unnecessary. All anyone has to do is get one book he
really likes, then he can go on reading and erasing, reading and erasing
for the rest of his life."
"It's an idea," Tallon said suspiciously. "Do you mind if I take this
thing off now?"
"Don't even twitch your toes until Mr. Cherkassky gives the word."
The blond sergeant tapped Tallon on the shoulder with his hornet gun.
"Oh, come on now, Sergeant," Cherkassky protested amiably. "You mustn't be
too hard on him. After all, he has been very cooperative. Very communicative,
too. I mean, look how much he told earlier about that girl he knew back
on Earth. Most men keep that sort of stuff to themselves. What was her name,
Tallon? Ah, I remember -- Mary."
trade lanes, which the manned ships that came afterward were very careful
to follow closely. That is the other aspect of null-space travel that
troubles you as you wait for the relays to act. Although it was a logical
deduction from the absence of reciprocity in null-space, a few pioneers
discovered the hard way that jumping from a point near A will not take you
to a corresponding point near B. Get more than about two light-seconds
from the established jumping-off point, the so-called portal, and you
are off on your own random pilgrimage to the far side of eternity.
That is why, during the final slow seconds as you float in your G-cell
and breathe the rubber-smelling air, you pray and you sweat.
That is also why the planet Emm Luther, formerly a colony of Earth and
now autonomous, jealously guarded the few strings of figures locked
in Sam Tallon's brain. Emm Luther had only a single continent, and her
devouring need for new breathing space equaled that of Earth itself. She
had one incredible stroke of luck in a probe that found a green planet
only four hundred portals out and less than two thousand back.
All she needed was time to consolidate her hold there
before the big ships -- the invincible sperm of Earth's
ceaseless self-multiplication-- -- could storm the new and fertile womb.
three
Tallon did not have long to wait.
His first realization that he was under attack came when he found himself
dancing with Myra, a girl who had died back on Earth twenty years earlier.
No, he whispered,
I don't want this
. But she was there in his arms as
they slowly gyrated in the varicolored dimness of the Stardust Room. He
tried to feel the hard pressure of the chair in the dingy hotel room on
Emm Luther, but the effort seemed pointless, for that was part of a future
which was still a long way off.
Suddenly he was very much younger, still working for his degree in
electronics, and he was holding Myra. It was all
real
. His eyes filled
gratefully with the sight of her massive helmet of auburn hair, her
whiskey-colored eyes. They moved slowly and contentedly to the sound of
the music, with Myra, as always, a fraction behind the beat. She never
could dance very well, he thought warmly, but there would be lots of time
to work on it after they were married. In the meantime it was enough to
drift on and on through pastel mists and star-shot twilight.
The ballroom tilted ponderously away. Another time, another place. He was
sitting in the comfortable old bar of the Berkeley, waiting for her. Oases
of orange light reflecting on paneled walls of rich dark wood. She was
taking far too long, and he grew angry. Myra knew where he was waiting,
so if she couldn't keep the date she could at least ring him. Probably
starting to take too much for granted, expecting him to go all the way out
to her place to see what was wrong. Well, he would teach her a lesson.
He began to drink determinedly, vindictively -- and the horror was growing,
spreading like a dark stain in spite of his frantic efforts to stop it.
Next morning. The drowsy quietness of the standards lab. The newspaper
spread on the cigarette-scarred bench and, incredibly, Myra's face looking
up at him from the matte plastic sheets. Her father, a sad, mumbling giant
who had been deserted years before by Myra's mother, had smothered Myra
with a pillow, then opened his wrists with a portable circular saw.
Dissolving colors, the searching tides of grief, again the music, and they
were dancing; but this time Myra was dragging far behind the slow rhythms.
She was limp and heavy. He fought to hold her up, and her breath sobbed
and gurgled in his ear. . . .
Tallon screamed and clamped his fingers on the greasy arms of the chair.
"Here he comes," a voice said. "Romantic little fellow, isn't he?
You never can tell just by looking at them." Somebody laughed quietly.
Tallon opened his eyes. The room was filled with men in the gray whipcords
of the E.L.S.P. civil security force. They carried small arms, most of them
with the fan-shaped snouts of hornet guns, but he noticed several circular
muzzles belonging to a more traditional type of weapon. Their faces were
amused, derisive, some of them still indented with faint pink lines left
by the masks that had protected them from the psychoneuro gas.
His stomach was erupting noisily at every breath, but Tallon found the
physical nausea unimportant compared with the emotional turmoil still
rocking his senses. The psychic shock was mingled with an intolerable
feeling of outrage, of having been invaded, slit open, and pinned to a
dissecting board like a laboratory specimen.
Myra, my love . . .
I'm sorry.
Oh, you bastards, you grinning, stinking --
He tensed for a moment, ready to dive forward, then realized he was
reacting exactly as expected. This was why they had used an LSD derivative
instead of a simple knockout gas. Tallon made himself relax; he could
take anything Kreuger, Cherkassky, or Zepperitz could hand out, and
he would prove it. He would live on, in one reasonably healthy piece,
even if it was only to read every book in some prison library.
"Very good, Tallon," a voice said. "Self-control is so important in your
profession." The speaker moved into Tallon's line of vision. He was a
dry, thin-faced man, wearing the black coat and white dog collar of an
Emm Lutherian government official. Tallon recognized the narrow face,
the vertically wrinkled neck, and the incongruously lush wavy hair of
Lorin Cherkassky, number two man in the security executive's hierarchy.
Tallon nodded impassively. "Good evening. I wondered -- "
"Just keep it shut," interrupted a chunky-shouldered blond who wore
sergeant's chevrons.
"It's all right, Sergeant." Cherkassky waved the younger man aside.
"We mustn't discourage Mr. Tallon from being communicative. He may be
expected to tell us quite a lot during the next few days."
"I'll be glad to tell you all I know, of course," Tallon said quickly.
"What's the point of trying to hold on to it?"
"Precisely!" Cherkassky's voice was an excited yelp, reminding Tallon of
the little man's notorious instability. "What's the point? I'm glad you
see it that way. Now, Mr. Tallon, will you answer one question right away?"
"What is it? Yes."
Cherkassky walked to the chest of drawers, his head making peacocklike
movements on the long neck at every step, and took out the empty automatic
pistol. "Where is the ammunition for this weapon?"
"In there. I threw it in the wastebasket."
"I see," Cherkassky said, stooping to retrieve the clip. "You hid it in
the wastebasket."
Tallon shifted uneasily on the seat. This was too childish to be true.
"I dropped it in the wastebasket. I didn't want it. I didn't want any
trouble." He kept his voice low and flat.
Cherkassky nodded sympathetically. "That's what I would say if I were in
your position. Yes, that's about the best thing you could say." He slid
the clip into the pistol butt and handed it to the sergeant. "Don't lose
this, Sergeant. It's evidence."
Tallon opened his mouth to speak, then closed it abruptly. The very
childishness of the proceedings was an important part of the technique.
There is nothing more galling, more frustrating, than being forced to
act like an adult when everybody around you is behaving like a malicious
juvenile. But he was going to take it all, without cracking.
There was a long silence during which Cherkassky watched him intently.
Tallon sat perfectly motionless, trying to subdue occasional gusts of
brilliant memory shards, pictures of Myra still alive, pale skin,
whiskey-colored eyes. He became aware of the seat cutting into the
backs of his legs and wondered if any movement on his part would bring
the multiple impact of a hornet gun. Most authorities regarded it as a
humane weapon, but Tallon had once accidentally stopped a full charge of
the tiny drug-laden darts, and the ensuing paralysis had caused thirty
minutes of agony.
As the silence stretched into minutes, without any preparations being made
to remove him from the hotel, Tallon began to worry. He looked around the
room, trying to find a clue, but the faces of the E.L.S.P. men remained
professionally impassive. Cherkassky pottered around contentedly, smiling
and shrinking back against the wall each time he met Tallon's eyes.
Tallon became aware of a peculiar sensation involving the skin of his
forehead and cheeks, an icy feeling combined with waves of pinpricks
passing across the individual pores. I've graduated, he thought; I'm
having my first cold sweat.
Seconds later the door was bumped open, and a uniformed man came in
carrying a heavy box of gray metal. He set it on a chair, glanced
briefly at Tallon, and left. Cherkassky snapped his fingers, and the
blond sergeant opened the box, revealing a control panel and coiled
leads on plastic reels. In a shallow tray, the ten circular terminals
of a brain-brush headset gleamed like tawdry jewelry.
"Now, Tallon -- time for a little editing." Cherkassky's powdery face
had become businesslike.
"Here? In the hotel?"
"Why not? The longer you have the information in your head, the greater
chance you have of transferring it to someone else."
"But it takes a trained psychologist to isolate any specific sequence of
thoughts," Tallon protested. "You're likely to blot out whole areas of
my memory that have nothing to -- " He stopped as Cherkassky's head began
to make little self-satisfied swaying movements on the turkey neck. Tallon
swore silently at himself. He had intended to take it all without a word,
absorb anything they could hand out -- but he had begun to squeal before
they had even touched him. So much for the short and spectacular career
of Iron Man Tallon. He compressed his lips and sat staring straight ahead
as Cherkassky positioned the linked terminals on his head. The sergeant
gave a signal, and the encircling wall of gray uniforms retreated into
the corridor, making the room suddenly bigger and colder. In the dismal
light the single cobweb still waved inanely from the warm-air vent.
Cherkassky stood beside the chair that held the gray box, stooping slightly
to make adjustments on the verniers. He ran his eyes over the dials and
glanced up at Tallon's face.
"Did you know, Tallon, that your basal resistance is abnormally low?
Perhaps you perspire easily; that always lowers the skin resistance.
You aren't a sweaty person, are you?" Cherkassky's nose wrinkled in
distaste, and the sergeant chuckled quietly.
Tallon scowled past him toward the window. It had misted over during the time
the room was crowded, and the few city lights that were visible looked like
balls of illuminated cotton. He longed to be outside, breathing the sharp
starry air. Myra had liked walking on frosty nights. . . .
"Mr. Tallon wants us to stop wasting time," Cherkassky said severely.
"He's right, of course. Let's get down to business. Now, Tallon, just
so that there are absolutely no misconceptions on either side -- you
are in your present predicament because you are part of an intelligence
network that by pure chance obtained details of portal coordinates, jump
increment, and jump bearings of the planet Aitch Mühlenberg, a territorial
acquisition of the revered government of Emm Luther. The information
was transferred to you, and you have committed it to memory. Correct?"
Tallon nodded compliantly, wondering if the brain-brush would be as
unpleasant as the capsule. Cherkassky picked up the remote control
and poised his thumb over the red button. It dawned on Tallon that the
instrument being used on him was a standard model, the same model as used
by less reputable psychiatrists. He began to wonder just how unofficial
his present treatment was. On Emm Luther, with its single continent run
by a single world government, there had never been any need to develop
the huge, highly organized intelligence and counterespionage agencies
that still proliferated on Earth. For this reason the three Lutherian
network executives were given an almost free hand, like contractors on any
normal government undertaking, but they were answerable to the Temporal
Moderator, the planet's equivalent of a president. The question was, how
far was a man like Cherkassky allowed to indulge his own idiosyncrasies?
"All right, then," Cherkassky said. "We want you to focus your thoughts
on the information. Try to get it nice and clean. And don't try to fool
us by thinking about something else; we will be checking. I will raise my
hand when I'm going to erase, which will be about five seconds from now."
Tallon worked to marshal the strings of figures, all at once desperately
afraid of losing his own name. Cherkassky's hand made a preliminary
movement, and Tallon fought down his panic as the figures refused to flow
properly, even with his Block-trained memory, then nothing. The numerals
that would have given Earth a whole new world were gone. There had been
no pain, no sound, no sensation of any kind, but the vital fragment of
knowledge was no longer his. As the expectation of pain faded Tallon
relaxed a little.
"That wasn't too horrible, was it?" Cherkassky smoothed the thick crown
of glossy hair, which seemed to thrive like a parasite at the expense
of his frail, dry body. "Quite painless, I'm told."
"I didn't feel anything," Tallon conceded.
"But the information has been erased?"
"Yes. It's gone."
"Astonishing!" Cherkassky's voice became conversational. "I never fail
to be astonished at what this little box of tricks can do. You know,
it makes libraries unnecessary. All anyone has to do is get one book he
really likes, then he can go on reading and erasing, reading and erasing
for the rest of his life."
"It's an idea," Tallon said suspiciously. "Do you mind if I take this
thing off now?"
"Don't even twitch your toes until Mr. Cherkassky gives the word."
The blond sergeant tapped Tallon on the shoulder with his hornet gun.
"Oh, come on now, Sergeant," Cherkassky protested amiably. "You mustn't be
too hard on him. After all, he has been very cooperative. Very communicative,
too. I mean, look how much he told earlier about that girl he knew back
on Earth. Most men keep that sort of stuff to themselves. What was her name,
Tallon? Ah, I remember -- Mary."
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