Night Walk (21 page)

" There you are, Tallon," Cherkassky said amiably. "And with your little
friend, too."
"Don't try to come up here." Tallon said it for lack of anything else to say.
Cherkassky shrank back against the metal wall, still smiling. "Tallon,
you and I have met only twice before -- and each time you have attempted
to kill me. If your final shot had been an inch lower, I would be dead
right now."
"It wasn't my final shot," Tallon lied.
"In that case you were very foolish to lose your gaudy little pistol.
I suppose you heard me kick it down into the hold? If I had realized it
was loaded I'd have been more careful in case it -- "
"All right, Cherkassky. You're laying it on too thick. It shows lack
of taste."
He stepped quickly back into the corridor, wondering what he could use to
defend himself. The only possibility was to find something to throw. He ran
to the galley and feverishly opened cupboards and drawers with his free hand.
There were no carving knives, and the table knives were of lightweight
plastic. Seconds were racing by, and to make matters even worse, Seymour's
eyes were almost closed, reducing Tallon's vision to a hazy grayness.
The only objects that looked promising were several large cans of fruit
next to one of the supply magazines. He tried to lift them in one arm,
but they rolled away, clattering on the floor. Tallon set Seymour on the
floor, gathered up the cans, and ran blindly down the corridor toward
the control room, expecting at any instant to feel a lead slug smash
into his spine. He got into the control room, jumped to one side, and
fumbled with the eyeset's controls until he picked up Cherkassky's eyes.
He got a sharp, steady view of the corridor, as seen from the other end,
and he realized Cherkassky had stood on the catwalk and watched him run,
without shooting. That meant the little man was determined to make a
marathon out of it. Tallon hefted one of the heavy cans, edged across
to the doorway, and hurled the can down the corridor with all his strength.
Through Cherkassky's eyes he saw his hand appear and the can come barreling
through the air. Cherkassky avoided it with ease and it bounced noisily
into the hold, filling the ship with echoes.
Tallon groped on the floor and got another can. He decided to wait till
Cherkassky was farther along the corridor, giving him less time to see --
and avoid -- the improvised missile thrown at him. With his back pressed
against the wall, Tallon watched the slowly zooming view of the corridor
and the expanding rectangle of the control-room door. At the entrance
to the galley, the view rotated to take in the disordered cupboards and
drawers; and there was Seymour inching across the floor, his pointed
teeth bared in a ridiculous attempt at a snarl. Tallon guessed what was
coming next.
"Go back, Seymour!" he shouted. "Lie down, boy."
Apart from shouting, there was nothing he could do. Closing his eyelids
did nothing to blot out the pictures he was receiving. He had to stand and
look along the pistol sights with Cherkassky's eyes. The pistol roared,
and Seymour's body smashed against the far wall of the galley.
Tallon stepped out and threw the can, every muscle in his body snapping
taut behind it. He heard a thud as it connected with something soft,
and then he was winging down the corridor, propelled by a white-hot
thrust of hatred. The metal walls spun violently as he slammed into
Cherkassky. They half-skidded, half-rolled, right to the dark edge of the
catwalk, then rebounded from the handrail and back down the full length
of the corridor. Somewhere along the way the eyeset was pushed up on to
his forehead, and Tallon was unable to see, but it made no difference
to him. He was at grips with Cherkassky, and a loudly chanting voice in
his head was telling him that nothing in the whole universe could stop
his hands from doing their appointed work.
He was wrong.
Using the Block-developed combat rhythms, he might have extinguished
Cherkassky in a few seconds; but his fingers, obeying a more ancient
discipline, crooked into the other man's throat. He felt Cherkassky's
body transformed by the same steely strength it had displayed when they
were falling from the hotel window long ago. Cherkassky's locked forearms
triangled upward in the oldest counter in the book, splitting Tallon's
hold, and Cherkassky twisted free. Tallon tried to prevent the separation,
which would give Cherkassky the advantage, but blows from the heavy pistol
numbed Tallon's arms. He was forced to take a valuable second to pull the
eyeset down onto his nose, knowing as he did so that the fight was lost.
Cherkassky made use of this opportunity, and Tallon recovered vision just
in time to see the gun barrel being jammed into his solar plexus. He fell
backward into the control room, the wind knocked out of him. Once again he
looked along the sights of Cherkassky's pistol, this time at himself. The
point of aim wandered from his belly to his head and back down again.
"You've had a long run, Tallon," Cherkassky said quietly, "but in a way
I'm glad. Shooting any other prisoner would ruin my reputation with our
revered Moderator, but you've caused so much trouble that nobody is going
to complain."
Tallon, gasping for breath, made a weak attempt to roll sideways as he saw
Cherkassky's finger tighten on the trigger; then the underlying assumption
behind the words reached his brain, a final message of unexpected hope.
"Wait . . . wait His lungs fought to supply the air necessary for speech.
"Goodbye, Tallon."
"Wait, Cherkassky . . . there's something you don't -- look at the screens!"
Cherkassky's eyes flicked momentarily to the unfamiliar star patterns on
the black panels, back down to Tallon, then focused on the screens again.
"This is a trick," Cherkassky said in a voice that was not quite normal.
"You didn't . . ."
"I did. We made an open-ended jump." Tallon struggled for breath. "So you
were right when you said shooting me won't ruin your reputation. Nobody will
ever know, Cherkassky."
"You're lying. The screens could be showing a recorded view.
"Look at the direct-vision panels then. How do you think we got into space
through all that heavy stuff you called in?"
"They knew I was in the ship. They wouldn't fire with me in the ship."
"They fired," Tallon said flatly, "and we jumped."
"But they
wouldn't
," Cherkassky whispered. "
Not at me.
"
Tallon kicked his feet upward, doubling Cherkassky forward on top of him.
This time he fought coldly and efficiently, impervious to fear or hatred,
to the thunderous sound of the pistol, to the knowledge that his enemy's
living eyes were his sole remaining gateway to light and beauty and stars.
Tallon closed that gateway forever.
twenty-one
You can feel like dying. You can even lie down on the floor and will
yourself to die. But all that happens is you go right on living.
Tallon made the discovery slowly, over a period of hours, as he walked
the silent ship. He visualized the Lyle Star as a bubble of brilliance
suspended in an infinity of darkness, and himself as a fleck of darkness
drifting in a sharply confined universe of light. Nothing could be more
pointless than prolonging that arrangement for fifteen years; yet he
was hungry, and there was food, so why not eat?
Tallon thought it over. A short-term goal. Once it was achieved, what
then? Wrong type of thinking, he decided. If you are going to exist on
short-term goals, you discard the logical processes associated with
long-term goals. When you are hungry you cook something and you eat it.
Then maybe you get tired, so you sleep; and when you wake up you are
hungry again. . . .
He took off the eyeset, but found his plastic eyes felt uncomfortably
naked without their protective covering, and put it back on. The first
short-term goal of his new existence would be to set up a tidy house.
He found Cherkassky's limp body, dragged it to the airlock, and propped it
against the outer door. It took him several minutes to position the body
in such a way that it would be sure to be carried clear of the lock when
the residual air exhausted. A dead body made a poor traveling companion
under normal circumstances, but an exposure to zero pressure would make
it even less attractive.
When he was satisfied with the arrangement of the body he went to fetch
Seymour, and laid the pathetic little husk in Cherkassky's lap.
Back in the control room he identified the relevant controls by touch,
then blew the lock. Exit two more characters, he thought, leaving Sam
Tallon alone on the stage. Doc Winfield had been the first; then Helen,
with the red hair and whiskey-colored eyes. It occurred to him that she
might not be dead, but there was no way he could find out, and he was
straying into the wrong type of thinking again.
Tallon went to the galley, lifted one can from each supply magazine,
and opened them. He identified their contents and memorized where each
had come from in the row of dispensers. As a welcome change from fish,
he decided on steak, and while it was cooking he found a refrigerated
compartment with stacks of plastic tubular containers of beer. Thankful
that Parane, where the Lyle Star had originated, had both adequate protein
supplies and a sensible outlook on the use of alcohol, he settled down
to his first meal in alien space. When he was finished he disposed of
the plastic plates and utensils, then sat down and waited for nothing
to happen.
Some time later he grew tired and went to find a bed. Sleep was a long
time in coming because he was many thousands of light-years from the rest
of his kind.
Tallon kept it up for four cycles of activity and sleep before concluding
he was bound to go mad if he continued this way. He decided he had to have
a long-term goal to give his life direction, even if the term were longer
than his life span and the goal unattainable.
He went into the control room and explored the central computing bank with
his fingertips, wishing he had paid more attention to it while eyes were
still available to him. It took him some time to satisfy himself that it
was a standard type, based on the cybernetic intelligence amplifier.
Null-space travel demanded that a ship position itself within portals
measuring no more than two light-seconds across. The standards of
precision involved required that the computing facility and the
astrogation complex be unified into a single automatic control system.
The control complex was fully programmed to account for variants, such as
variable magnitude stars, in the perceived celestial sphere; but provision
was also made to prevent positional fixes from being affected by rare
and unpredictable phenomena like novas and supernovas. This took the form
of data injection panels that provided pathways right into, among other
things, the instruction store. The data injector had not changed since
the first days of null-space travel. Tallon had heard that the relatively
primitive system was retained solely because it enabled a reasonably
competent engineer to convert a spaceship into an interstellar probe.
In other words, the design philosophy of the constructors was: This vessel
is fully guaranteed and will always get you to your destination; but if it
doesn't, you might as well try finding another world while you are out there.
Tallon had never investigated the matter personally, but he was banking on
the stories being true, for there was no point in his making any further
jumps without some means of checking on his position. The possibilities
of his getting within reach of a habitable world in fifteen years of
continuous null-space leaps were perhaps one in a billion. He was not
deceiving himself about the chances of success, but there was nothing
else open to him; and vegetating, which he had tried for four days,
was unacceptable. Besides, in a truly random universe, he might make
only one jump and find himself hanging above Earth itself, almost able
to breathe its atmosphere, to smell the smoke of leaf fires drifting in
the soft thick air of October evenings.
He went to work on the central control complex. Two more days of rest
and activity went by before he was satisfied that he had successfully
reprogrammed the system to meet his new requirements. Working blind,
he taxed his brain to its full extent, reaching the same degree of
involvement that had enabled him to produce the eyesets.
Several times he found himself filled with a powerful sense of satisfaction.
This, he thought, is what I'm good at. Why did I give up everything after
college and take to star-jumping? Each time, unaccountably, he saw Helen's
red hair and unusual eyes superimposed on his mental picture of the control
complex. And finally he had altered the astrogation network from a beast
that would jump only when it knew where it was, to one that would refuse
to move if its multiple senses detected a planetary system within reach.
When Tallon had finished he felt sane. His mind felt sharp and clear.
He went to bed and slept soundly.
After breakfast, which was what he called the first meal after a period
of sleep, Tallon made his way into the control room and sat down in the
center seat. He hesitated, preparing himself for the psychic wrench, and
hit the button that projected the ship into that other incomprehensible
universe.
Click!
A flash of unbearable brilliance seared into his eyes;
then the jump was over.
Tallon ripped off the eyeset and lay back in the big chair with his hands
pressed over his eyes, his mind racing. He had forgotten the flash that had
burned into his optic nerves when he'd jumped the Lyle Star out of New
Wittenburg. There was nothing in any book that dealt with light flashes
occurring in null-space; in fact most people experienced a momentary
blindness during the transition. He listened to the computer and it was
quiet, which meant he had not materialized within range of any planet
in any part of the big, cold galaxy.
Mentally shrugging, he prepared to make another jump. This time he lowered
the eyeset's sensitivity to almost zero, and when the flash came it was
greatly reduced in intensity. He took the eyeset off and made another jump
that produced no light at all. With the eyeset back on, he made a fourth
jump, and the flash was there again.