Night Walk (24 page)

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.

A Banner book never before published
TREK
THROUGH A
BLACK WORLD
For "refusing to cooperate," the Emm Luther Special
Police took out Earth agent Sam Tallon's eyes and jailed
him on a swamp as dark and eeire as the black void of
his sightless days . . .
But then Sam invented a means to see -- ludicrous,
agonizing, yet still a way to make escape possible. He
saw through the eyes of a bird, a dog, a woman guard.
Later he saw
himself
, through the eyes of his enraged
Emm Luther pursuers . . .
They would never let him go, Sam knew. To get at what
he had hidden in his memory, they'd seal off the con-
tinent, the whole planet of Emm Luther.
For he, Sam Tallon, though blind, was still the possessor
of the most important secret in the universe . . .
Printed in U.S.A.