Night Walk (23 page)

He switched off the artificial gravity.
As the struggling, shrilling rat floated into the air Tallon swam toward
it, ready with a transparent plastic jar taken from the galley. At the
sight of him the rat became frantic, whipping its body about in the
air like a landed fish, presenting Tallon -- who got only fragmentary,
whirling glimpses of himself -- with a delicate problem in ballistics.
On the second attempt he scooped up the writhing animal, put the lid loosely
back on the jar, and moved forward again, smiling slightly as the plastic
container vibrated in his hand.
The first thing Tallon did with his new eyes was to instruct the Lyle Star
to find out where it was.
It took the astrogation complex only a few seconds to take crude bearings
from the other seventeen galaxies of the home cluster, then refine and
confirm its findings with quasar readings. The ship was about 10,000
light-years from the galactic center, and about 35,000 light-years from
Earth. Tallon was a hardened star tramp, but it was difficult to look
at the glowing figures hanging in the air above the computer without
an icy sense of dismay. The distance across which he hoped to pick his
way was so great that the light from Sol could not reach him; it would
have been absorbed by interstellar dust on the way. But if there were
no dust, and if he had a telescope of unlimited power and resolution,
he could have looked at Earth and seen Upper Paleolithic men beginning
to assert supremacy over the forests of Earth, proudly carrying their
newly perfected weapons of flint.
Tallon tried to visualize himself successfully crossing that unimaginable
void -- seated in the big chair, plastic button eyes blind to the
flowing starscapes, a captive rat blinking malevolently in a plastic
jar on Tallon's knees -- guided only by an idea born in blindness in
his own mind and now spinning endlessly in the brain cells of a computer.
Fantastic as the vision was, he had to go ahead and try.
To build his model of the space routes, Tallon transferred the position
of every portal, expressed as absolute coordinates, into the computer's
working volume and converted them to coordinates based on the Lyle Star's
present position. This took some time, but it gave him a map that was the
normal-space equivalent of the one he already had of null-space. He then
plugged the module containing the latter back into the main facility and
programmed it to find the correspondence, if any existed. There was also
the possibility that there was a genuine correspondence so attenuated
that it would be found only by one of the planet-wide computer networks
such as existed on Earth, but he refused to dwell on that.
An hour later the computer chimed softly and a set of equations was born
in the air above it, the glowing symbols hanging silently over its solution
projector. There was no necessity for Tallon to understand it --
the astrogation complex was capable of absorbing and acting on the
information by itself -- but he had a natural interest in seeing for
himself what could very well be the mathematical touchstone that would
convert null-space lead to normal-space gold.
For a moment the equations looked completely incomprehensible, as though
he were taking them in with not only a rat's eyes but a rat's brain as well.
He stared at the figures, holding the plastic jar up in front of them,
then they seemed to shift into focus as his dormant mathematical facilities
were stirred into activity. Tallon recognized the elements of a
four-dimensional wave surface, the quartic, and suddenly realized he
was looking at an incomplete and camouflaged definition of a Kummer
surface. That meant null-space was analogous to a second-degree
singularity surface -- a knobbly interconnected entity, with sixteen
real nodes and as many double tangent planes. No wonder then that,
with a negligible sample of referent points, the years of research into
null-space astrogation had got precisely nowhere.
Tallon smiled. If he got out of his present situation, and it turned out
that the nineteenth-century German mathematician Ernst Kummer had been
a Lutheran, there would be a beautiful piece of irony involved.
Tallon reconnected the astrogation complex and the null-space drive unit,
and punched in the coordinates and jump increment for what he hoped
would be the first controlled flight in the history of interstellar
travel. He took off the eyeset, to avoid a prolonged blast of light,
and hurled the ship into the null-space continuum for the eight seconds
demanded by the new equations.
When he put the eyeset on again he sat and sweated for a moment before
lifting the rat up to where it could see the position report of the
astrogation complex. It presented a long string of absolute coordinates
that Tallon was too agitated to comprehend. He instructed the computer
to reduce the information to give a single, simple figure: the geodesic
distance between the Lyle Star and Earth.
The new answer was just short of a hundred light-years.
Assuming he had not made a lucky random jump, that would mean an error
of only one third of a percent of the total distance.
Trembling slightly, in a manner unbecoming to the conqueror of null-space,
Tallon programmed the next jump and carried it out. This time when he put
on the eyeset there was a sharp bright star glowing ahead. The computer
said less than half a light-year.
Tallon cheered unashamedly and squeezed the plastic jar, wishing he could
convey to its uncomprehending inmate that the shining jewel in front of
them was the sun that had lighted the way for both their ancestors to
crawl out of the sea, and that their breathing bodies had been created
from its abundant energy, that it represented everything summed up in
the word "home." Never mind, he thought, no doubt you and that other rat
back there are thinking things I'll never be able to understand either.
He made another jump, aware that this could be the last before going
over to ion drive. When it was completed, Tallon raised the eyeset,
knowing that he must be well into the solar system, possibly within
sight of Earth itself.
Before he could settle the eyeset on the bridge of his nose, the raucous
note of an alarm hooter blasted through the control room.
"Identify yourself immediately," a harsh voice crackled from the external
communications system. "Reply at once, or you will be destroyed by missiles
that have already been launched toward your position." The voice went on,
repeating the message in the other major languages of the empire.
Tallon sighed wearily. He had crossed half the galaxy; and now he knew,
beyond all doubt, that he had reached home.
twenty-three
"This is your last warning. Identify yourself immediately."
Tallon activated the communications system. "Let's do things a little
differently for once," he said. "Why don't
you
identify yourself?"
There was a silence, and when the voice spoke again it contained a faintly
noticeable edge of indignation. "I will repeat this warning only once:
Missiles have already been dispatched toward your position."
"Save them," Tallon said casually, resting his fingers on the null-space
jump button. "They can't touch me. And I repeat: I want to know your name
and rank."
Another silence. Tallon leaned back in the big chair. He knew he was being
unnecessarily awkward, but those 35,000 light-years had drained him of
the last vestiges of tolerance for the politico-military system in which
he had spent most of his life. While waiting for a reply he programmed the
Lyle Star to make a jump through null-space of only half a million miles,
and held it in reserve. He had just finished when preliminary flickers
of color wavered in the air in front of him, showing that communications
techs somewhere were laboring to establish visual contact with his ship.
The colors brightened abruptly and flowed together to form a three-
dimensional image of a hard-faced, gray-haired man in the charcoal uniform
of a marshal. He was seated, and the image was so good that Tallon could
see the network of tiny red veins over his cheekbones. The marshal leaned
forward, with disbelief in his eyes.
"Name, please," Tallon said determinedly, making no concessions for the
effect his appearance was bound to have on the marshal.
"I don't know who you are," the marshal said slowly, "but you have just
committed suicide. Our missiles have almost reached range coincidence.
It's too late to stop them now."
Tallon smiled easily, enjoying a moment of megalomania; and as the proximity
indicators screamed he hit the jump button. A flood of brilliance poured
into his eyes, but it was only the now-familiar null-space flash. When the
Lyle Star emerged in normal space again one of the vision panels was glowing
fiercely with the missile bursts half a million miles away. The image of
the marshal had vanished, but it wavered into apparent solidity a few seconds
later. He looked amazed.
"How did you do that?"
"Name, please."
"I am Marshal James J. Jennings, commanding the Third Echelon of the
Grand Fleet of Imperial Earth." The marshal shifted uneasily in his seat;
he had the look of a man swallowing a bitter pill.
"Please listen to this carefully, Marshal; here's what I want you to do."
"What makes you -- "
"Please keep quiet and listen," Tallon interrupted coldly. "I'm Sam Tallon,
formerly of the Amalgamated Intelligence Agencies, and I'm piloting the
Lyle Star, which was sent to Emm Luther to pick me up. You can confirm
this easily enough."
The marshal leaned to one side, listening to something that was not being
transmitted through the intership hook-up. He nodded several times and
turned to face Tallon.
"I have just checked on it. The Lyle Star was directed to Emm Luther,
but it ran into difficulties. Someone on the ship made an open-ended jump,
with Tallon aboard -- which means you are lying."
Tallon spoke angrily. "I've come a long way, Marshal, and I'm -- "
He stopped as Jennings suddenly left his chair, disappearing from view
for a few seconds, then came back.
"It's all right, Tallon," the marshal said with a new note of respect in
his voice. "We have just managed to get a visual check on your ship. It is
the Lyle Star."
"Are you certain? I could have painted the name on it myself."
Jennings nodded. "That's true, but we weren't going by the name. Don't you
know you have a complete berthing cradle and a few thousand yards of
spaceport concrete with you? There are a couple of dead men in Lutheran
uniforms drifting around you, too."
Tallon had forgotten that the Lyle Star would have snatched a sizable chunk
of Emm Luther into null-space inside its warp field. The instantaneous
vacuum created by the ship's departure must have caused havoc in that
region of the terminal. And Helen's body had been right on the edge of
it. His need for her, which had been blurred by danger and despair,
was suddenly sharp, obliterating everything else in his mind.
Oh, that I were where Helen lies. . . .
"I must apologize to you, Tallon," Jennings said. "A state of war has
existed between Earth and Emm Luther for three days. That's why we were
so jumpy when your ship was detected so close to Earth and so far from
a portal. It looked like some kind of sneak attack."
"Don't apologize, Marshal. Can you arrange a direct communications link
with the Block? Right now?"
"I could, but it wouldn't be secure."
"That doesn't matter. I have nothing private to say at the moment."
"We are delighted that you got back, Tallon, but this is highly irregular."
The representative of the Block was a man Tallon had never seen before.
His fresh skin, stubby brown hands, and casual clothes made him look
like a successful small-time farmer. The background to his image was a
deliberately anonymous pastel green blur.
"Irregular, but also important," Tallon said. "Are you near the top?"
The man raised his bleak eyes for a second, and Tallon knew he was near
the top. "My name is Seely. Before you say anything, Tallon, I want to
remind you we are on an open circuit. I also want -- "
"Let's stop talking about irrelevancies," Tallon said impatiently,
"and concentrate on my requirements."
" Tallon!" Seely half-rose from his seat, then relaxed into it again.
He smiled. "We will terminate this conversation right now. Obviously,
you have been under a great strain, and there is a possibility you might
stray on to classified subjects. I'm sure you know what I mean."
"You mean I might make some accidental reference to the capsule in my brain?
The one that still holds all the route information for getting to the new
Lutheran planet?"
The ruddy brown of Seely's cheeks changed to the color of clay. "I'm sorry
you did that, Tallon. I'll talk to you here in the Block. Marshal Jennings
has been instructed to bring you in without any further delay. That's all."
"Marshal Jennings can't do that," Tallon said quickly and confidently.
"Ask him what happened when he fired some of his missiles at me half an
hour ago."
Seely moved a key on his desk, cutting off the sound, and spoke silently
to someone out of camera range. He switched on the sound again and turned
to Tallon, his eyes wary. "I've been hearing some unusual reports about
you, Tallon. The first indications are that your ship emerged in normal
space right inside the solar system. Have you established a new portal?"
"Portals are a thing of the past, Seely. I've cracked the null-space
astrogation problem. I can go anywhere I want without portals."
Seely interlaced his stubby fingers and stared at Tallon over the steeple
they formed. "In that case, I have no alternative but to order a complete
interference blanket over all communications in the solar system until we
bring you in to make your report."
"You do that," Tallon said pleasantly, "and you'll never see me again.
I will visit every world in the empire, starting with Emm Luther, and
broadcast the method on every waveband there is."
"How do you expect to get out? I can englobe every . . ." Seely hesitated.
"Every portal, I believe you were going to say," Tallon put in, feeling a
cold anger flooding through him. "You are out of date, Seely; you and the
portals and the Block are all part of ancient history. From now on we are
through squabbling over a handful of worlds found by pure chance. Every
planet in the galaxy is open to us, and there is going to be room for
everybody. Even for you and your kind, Seely -- although you'll have to
change. Nobody is going to stay and play soldiers in your backyard when
a hundred thousand new planets are available out there for