Authors: Bob Shaw
Night Walk (4 page)
"I take it you use the word in a very loose sense, Doctor." Tallon fingered
the bandages over his eyes. "Or do you mean lucky in comparison with some
of the others Cherkassky has brought in here?"
"I mean, considering the sort of information you had, any other government
in the universe, including that of Earth, would have executed you
immediately."
"Cherkassky tried to execute my mind. Do you know he kept on pressing
the red button on that -- "
"Enough!" Muller's voice had lost its friendliness. "That isn't my
department."
"My mistake, Doctor. I thought you said you were head of psychology.
Or is it that you don't want to think too much about the kind of men
you work for?"
There was a long silence. When Muller spoke again he had regained his
professional warmth. "I'm prescribing something to get you through the
backlash period, Tallon. I'm sure you'll find you'll settle down here
very well. Now Dr. Heck will see you."
Muller must have given a signal of some kind, for a door opened quietly
and Tallon felt a hand grasp his arm. He was led out of the room and along
more corridors. The medical block, if that's what it was, seemed a lot
bigger than he had expected. Although lagging behind Earth in many fields
of research, it was possible that Emm Luther could be advanced in surgical
techniques. After all, Tallon thought, this is the twenty-second century.
There are all kinds of things that can be done for an injured person --
microsurgery, cell regeneration, electron surgery, tissue welding.
By the time he was escorted into a room that smelled of antiseptics,
Tallon was drenched with perspiration and shaking uncontrollably. Someone
guided him to what felt like a high couch and made him lie down. A
feeling of warmth on his forehead and lips told him that powerful lights
were shining on his face. There was a short delay during which he heard
soft footsteps and the rustle of clothing near by. He fought to check
the trembling, but it was impossible; the single breath of hope had
shattered his control.
"Well now, Mr. Tallon." The man's voice had the slight German accent
common on Emm Luther. "You're nervous, I see. Dr. Muller said you'd be
in need of medication. I think we'll give you a couple of cc's of one
of our blends of distilled tranquility."
"I don't need it," Tallon said determinedly. "If it's all right with you,
I'd just like to get on with the . . . with the . . ."
"I understand. Let's see now."
Tallon felt the bandages being gently cut away from his eyes; and then,
incredibly, Dr. Heck began to whistle.
"Oh, yes, I see . . . I see. An unfortunate accident, of course, but things
could have been worse, Mr. Tallon. I think we can fix this up for you
without too much difficulty. It will take a week or so, but we'll be able
to patch you up all right."
"Do you mean it?" Tallon drew in an ecstatic, shuddering breath.
"Do you really mean you'll be able to do something with my eyes?"
"Of course. We'll start work on the eyelids in the morning -- that's
the trickiest part -- and we'll clean up the bridge of the nose and do
something about the brows."
"But my eyes -- what about my eyes?"
"No problem. What color would you like?"
"Color?" Tallon felt a chill of fear.
"Yes," Heck said cheerfully. "It's small recompense for being blind,
but we can give you a really beautiful pair of brown plastic eyes. Or
you can have blue -- but with your coloring I wouldn't recommend it."
Tallon made no reply. An icy eternity went by before he felt the welcome
needle slide into his arm.
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.
the bandages over his eyes. "Or do you mean lucky in comparison with some
of the others Cherkassky has brought in here?"
"I mean, considering the sort of information you had, any other government
in the universe, including that of Earth, would have executed you
immediately."
"Cherkassky tried to execute my mind. Do you know he kept on pressing
the red button on that -- "
"Enough!" Muller's voice had lost its friendliness. "That isn't my
department."
"My mistake, Doctor. I thought you said you were head of psychology.
Or is it that you don't want to think too much about the kind of men
you work for?"
There was a long silence. When Muller spoke again he had regained his
professional warmth. "I'm prescribing something to get you through the
backlash period, Tallon. I'm sure you'll find you'll settle down here
very well. Now Dr. Heck will see you."
Muller must have given a signal of some kind, for a door opened quietly
and Tallon felt a hand grasp his arm. He was led out of the room and along
more corridors. The medical block, if that's what it was, seemed a lot
bigger than he had expected. Although lagging behind Earth in many fields
of research, it was possible that Emm Luther could be advanced in surgical
techniques. After all, Tallon thought, this is the twenty-second century.
There are all kinds of things that can be done for an injured person --
microsurgery, cell regeneration, electron surgery, tissue welding.
By the time he was escorted into a room that smelled of antiseptics,
Tallon was drenched with perspiration and shaking uncontrollably. Someone
guided him to what felt like a high couch and made him lie down. A
feeling of warmth on his forehead and lips told him that powerful lights
were shining on his face. There was a short delay during which he heard
soft footsteps and the rustle of clothing near by. He fought to check
the trembling, but it was impossible; the single breath of hope had
shattered his control.
"Well now, Mr. Tallon." The man's voice had the slight German accent
common on Emm Luther. "You're nervous, I see. Dr. Muller said you'd be
in need of medication. I think we'll give you a couple of cc's of one
of our blends of distilled tranquility."
"I don't need it," Tallon said determinedly. "If it's all right with you,
I'd just like to get on with the . . . with the . . ."
"I understand. Let's see now."
Tallon felt the bandages being gently cut away from his eyes; and then,
incredibly, Dr. Heck began to whistle.
"Oh, yes, I see . . . I see. An unfortunate accident, of course, but things
could have been worse, Mr. Tallon. I think we can fix this up for you
without too much difficulty. It will take a week or so, but we'll be able
to patch you up all right."
"Do you mean it?" Tallon drew in an ecstatic, shuddering breath.
"Do you really mean you'll be able to do something with my eyes?"
"Of course. We'll start work on the eyelids in the morning -- that's
the trickiest part -- and we'll clean up the bridge of the nose and do
something about the brows."
"But my eyes -- what about my eyes?"
"No problem. What color would you like?"
"Color?" Tallon felt a chill of fear.
"Yes," Heck said cheerfully. "It's small recompense for being blind,
but we can give you a really beautiful pair of brown plastic eyes. Or
you can have blue -- but with your coloring I wouldn't recommend it."
Tallon made no reply. An icy eternity went by before he felt the welcome
needle slide into his arm.
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.
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