Night Walk (9 page)
Authors: Bob Shaw
The robot rifles were more than capable of shooting clear across the
four-mile reach of swamp, so their missiles were fitted with time fuses,
which limited the range to two thousand yards. Their effective range,
however, was governed by the density of the swamp mist. When it was at its
thickest a man could get within four hundred yards of the pylons before
his body heat reached the trigger threshold. But even in the murkiest
periods, a sudden gust of wind could open a swirling avenue far into
the swamp, the gleaming grasshopper legs of the servos would contract,
and a heavy slug would howl its way down the misty tree lanes.
Winfield had thought a lot about the rattler rifles while he was planning
his escape.
On the second morning in the swamp he opened his pack, took out a small
knife, and split the plastic that covered Tallon's hands and his own.
They gathered armfuls of the thick, double-walled dringo leaves, dodging
the whizzing leaps of the sheltering scorpions, and sewed them together
to make heavy dark green blankets.
"We'll soon be back on dry land," Winfield said. "You can see the green
stuff thinning out already. The mist is quite heavy this morning, so
we're all right for another few hundred yards; but after that keep your
head down and stay under your screen. Got it?"
"Keep my head down and stay under my screen."
The encumbrance of the heavy blanket of leaves made movement more difficult
than ever. Tallon sweltered under the plastic as he struggled along behind
the doctor, deprived of even the meager companionship of the sonar torch's
electronic voice in his ear. He had had to switch it off as soon as the
screen was pulled over his head.
They inched their way forward for two hours before Tallon noticed that the
going was getting easier. Gradually there was less backtracking to do,
fewer floundering escapes from seemingly bottomless wells of slime. He
began to think about the possibility of walking upright in fresh air,
of being clean and dry, of eating again.
Suddenly, up ahead, Winfield gave a hoarse scream.
"Doc! What is it?" Tallon heard violent splashing sounds, and cursed
his blind helplessness. "What's wrong, Doc?"
"A spider. A big one. . . ." The doctor screamed again, and the splashing
grew louder.
Tallon threw aside the burden of leaves and crept forward as quickly as
he could, expecting at any moment to put his unprotected hand far down
into a cold wet mouth.
"Where are you, Doc? Can you see me?"
"This way, son. That's far enough. Hold out your left hand."
Tallon did as he was told and felt something light and brittle drop into
his fingers. It was the eyeset. He put it on and was jolted with green
blurs of brilliant light. Winfield had dropped the birdcage, and Tallon
found himself looking at an unearthly scene through the slime-streaked
plastic. At first he did not recognize the mud-splattered starfish shape
that was himself or the other writhing one that was Winfield.
The doctor was lying on his back, and his right leg was sunk up to the knee
in a seething patch of turbulence. Red stains were spreading in the churning
water, and around its perimeter eight jointed stalks whipped and quivered
in the air. Moaning with dismay, Tallon oriented himself and lunged sideways
for the spear, which had dropped clear of Winfield's hand. He lifted it
and drove the point down through the mud toward where he guessed the
muck spider's body to be. The surface of the water heaved sluggishly,
and the spear twisted in his grasp.
"Hold on, Doc. I'm using the spear on it."
"It won't work that way. Skin too tough. Got -- got to go down the throat.
Give me the spear."
Tallon hauled the spear back and guided it into Winfield's blindly grasping
hand. The doctor's mouth gaped silently as he took the crude weapon and
worked the point down into the water close to his leg. The green stalks
clawed eagerly at his arms, then suddenly sprang upright.
"I'm getting there," Winfield grunted. "I'm getting it."
He grasped the spear higher up on its shaft and triumphantly began to go
up it, hand over hand. The surface of the swamp all around him convulsed
as his weight bore down on the vibrating spear. Tallon, crouched close by,
was totally absorbed in the struggle when silent alarms began to sound in
his head. Winfield was winning his battle, but there was another danger,
something they were forgetting.
"Doc!" he shouted. " You're standing up!"
Winfield froze for an instant, looking guilty rather than afraid, and
was dropping to the ground when the missile claimed him.
Tallon heard the incredible impact, the subway roar of the missile's
flight arriving in its wake, and he glimpsed the doctor's headless body
cartwheeling away over the water. Seconds later came the tardy, rolling
echoes of the rifle shot. The spear still stood upright in the mud,
rocking slightly with the movements of the unseen spider.
That was a stupid action, Tallon thought numbly; you weren't supposed
to stand up, Doc. You warned me not to stand up, and then
you
stood
up. He crouched on his hands and knees for several seconds, shaking his
head bewilderedly; then the anger returned, the same anger that had let
him carry Cherkassky out through a hotel window into the thin air high
above New Wittenburg.
Tallon wiped the slime off the plastic cover of the bird cage to give himself
a better view of his own actions; then he crept to the spear. Ignoring the
beating of the jointed green stalks, he pulled the spear up and drove it
back down into the same spot again and again, until the water was whorled
with cream-colored fluid. Pulling the spear up for the last time,
he went in search of Winfield's body. He found it in a shallow pool,
already shrouded in a shimmering cloak of leeches.
"I'm sorry, Doc," he said aloud, "but Earth expects you to do one more thing.
And I know you would want to oblige."
Tallon worked the tip of the spear into a fold in the plastic of the
doctor's suit, and groaning with the effort, levered the body into an
upright position. He was much closer this time, and the impact of the
second missile stunned his senses as the spear and its grisly burden
were ripped from his fingers. Tallon collected the bird and the supply
pack, then draped himself in the heavy screen of dringo leaves. He moved
forward for another four hours before he risked making a tiny opening
in the overlapping leaves and holding the bird cage close to it.
He had almost reached the northern edge of the swamp, and far ahead,
with sunlight gleaming on its upper surfaces, the slim pylon of a rattler
rifle soared up above the mists. Tallon had no way of knowing if he was
looking at the rifle that had killed Logan Winfield, but somewhere along
the line one of the sentient machines would be registering two missiles
fired. To the Pavilion security force, two missiles fired would mean
that two prisoners had terminated their sentences.
Beyond the slender pylon Tallon glimpsed the sloping gray uplands of
the continent's spinal ridge. He settled down, with the bird cage held
tight in his arms, to wait for night and the start of the real journey.
There were still a thousand miles to New Wittenburg -- and eighty thousand
portals to Earth.
ten
Tallon passed through the line of pylons at dusk.
He guessed the declination of the rifles would be limited to the edge
of the swamp and beyond, but he stayed beneath the screen anyway, and
the crawling feeling between his shoulder blades remained there until he
had safely crossed the line. His first action on the other side was to
cut away the plastic envelope, wrap it inside the leaves, and hide the
bundle in a clump of prickly shrub. Working quickly, he took Ariadne II
out of her cage, tied her leg to the epaulette of his prison uniform,
and climbed the palisade that kept the general public from straying into
the rattlers' domain.
The exhilaration of freedom, of walking like a human being on firm ground
again, sustained Tallon as he moved diagonally over the rocky foothills
marking the beginning of a mountain chain that straggled the whole length
of the continent. When he had gained a little height he saw the trembling,
varicolored lights of a small town clustered in the curve of a bay about
five miles distant. The awesome planetary ocean stretched blackly away to
the west, pricked here and there by the navigation lights of trawlers. He
breathed deeply, savoring his release from the Pavilion, as well as the
release from all pressures of human identity -- a feeling one gets when
nobody in the whole universe knows where he is or even if he exists.
At that moment the journey Tallon was about to attempt seemed absurdly
easy. This, had he lived, would have been Winfield's hour of triumph,
Tallon knew. But the doctor was dead, and dead again.
Suddenly Tallon was tired and hungry and aware that he stank. There were
no lights visible between him and the town -- the ground appeared too
rough for any sort of farming -- so he headed down again to the water's
edge. On the way he searched in Winfield's pack and found, in addition
to the green guards' uniforms, a flashlight, soap, and depilatory cream.
There were also several bars of candy -- more reminders of the old
doctor's years of patient work toward a day he was never going to see.
Standing on the pebbles of the narrow beach, Tallon stripped and washed
in the cold sea. Keeping only his boots, he put on the fresh clothing
and was relieved to find that one of the stretch-fabric uniforms fit him
well enough. He tied the unprotesting bird to one shoulder, slung the
pack over the other, and began walking north.
At first it seemed a good idea to stick to the beach in preference to
the rock-strewn hillside, but as he walked it became obvious that there
was no real beach. Mostly there was just a tiny strip of rough pebbles,
and in many places tough grasses grew right to the water's edge. After
he'd been stumbling along the uneven stones for a while Tallon remembered
he was not going to find any stretches of smooth sand. Emm Luther had no
moon, which meant it had practically no tides, and therefore no beaches
and no sand.
If only there were a moon, darling, we could have a moonlit picnic on
the beach , he thought,
if only there were a beach.
Munching the candy, he moved a little farther inland, with the intention of
walking until he was perhaps half a mile from the town, and then trying to
get some rest; but an unexpected occurrence forced him to change his plans.
Ariadne II went to sleep. Tallon flicked the bird with his finger a few
times, and she opened her eyes for a couple of seconds, but closed them
again, plunging him into darkness. He felt annoyed, but this soon passed
when he considered what she had been through on his behalf.
In all probability any Earthside species of bird would have died from
over-adrenalation long before this.
He lay down and tried to sleep. Although he was almost as far south as it
was possible to go on Emm Luther and still remain on dry land, winter was
just beginning to blend into spring and the night was cold. A long time
went by before he achieved unconsciousness, and then he had dreams --
of talking to Winfield, of dancing with Helen Juste, of flying up and
up into the coppery light of dawn with the long-shadowed land falling
away below. This last was very vivid. There was a tiny figure of a man
in a dark green uniform lying down there on the grass. Tallon moved,
clutching frantically for support.
He was flying!
Horizons of sea and
land rotated sickeningly, and there was nothing under him but air.
His fingers sank into wiry grass. He became aware of the pressure of
the hard ground against his back, and came fully awake. The visions
of wheeling land and sea persisted, but now he knew what was causing
them. Ariadne II had worked herself free and had escaped while she had
the chance. The pictures grayed out as she passed beyond the range of
the eyeset.
Her loss presented him with another problem -- finding new eyes and using
them to get hold of some food. He had to get something solid to eat in
a hurry. The candy had given his blood sugar a temporary boost, but the
overstimulatjon of the pancreas, which always accompanies the intake
of neat carbohydrate, had flooded his system with sugar~amnihilating
insulin. The result was that his blood sugar had dropped even farther
below the fasting level, and now he could hardly stand without his knees
buckling. He wished the doctor had thought enough about the nutrition
problems of a blind man on the run to have included milk solids or some
other convenient form of protein in the escape kit. But that was not
getting him any closer to the space terminal at New Wittenburg.
Tallon put the eyeset on "search and hold" and picked up seabirds cruising
over the water near the shore. He got more aerial views of the ocean dressed
in its early morning grays, the tousled hillside, and his own dark green
figure. This was good enough to let him continue walking north. It was
still very early in the morning, and he reached the outskirts of the town
just as the place was coming awake. He was able to switch to the eyes of
men driving to work at dawn. None of them seemed to pay attention to him.
For a while Tallon was content to walk free along the quiet thoroughfares,
marveling at how Earth-like his surroundings were. The big northern city
of Testament, where he had spent most of his time while on Emm Luther,
had a character of its own that was unlike anything on Earth; but small
towns were small towns no matter where you went in the galaxy. The neat
bungalows, sleeping in the morning stillness, were the same as those
he had seen on half a dozen worlds; and the children's tricycles, lying
on the front lawns, were painted red, because human children the galaxy
over liked them that way.
Why should a man choose one planet and say, this one I will put above all
others? If be survived the psychic disembowelment of the flicker-transits
and arrived on yet another miraculous green orb, why shouldn't that be
enough? Why carry with him the paraphernalia of political allegiances,
doctrinal conflicts, imperialism, the Block? And yet Winfield had been
blown to bits, and Sam Tallon was still carrying the location of a
brand-new planet embedded in his brain.
four-mile reach of swamp, so their missiles were fitted with time fuses,
which limited the range to two thousand yards. Their effective range,
however, was governed by the density of the swamp mist. When it was at its
thickest a man could get within four hundred yards of the pylons before
his body heat reached the trigger threshold. But even in the murkiest
periods, a sudden gust of wind could open a swirling avenue far into
the swamp, the gleaming grasshopper legs of the servos would contract,
and a heavy slug would howl its way down the misty tree lanes.
Winfield had thought a lot about the rattler rifles while he was planning
his escape.
On the second morning in the swamp he opened his pack, took out a small
knife, and split the plastic that covered Tallon's hands and his own.
They gathered armfuls of the thick, double-walled dringo leaves, dodging
the whizzing leaps of the sheltering scorpions, and sewed them together
to make heavy dark green blankets.
"We'll soon be back on dry land," Winfield said. "You can see the green
stuff thinning out already. The mist is quite heavy this morning, so
we're all right for another few hundred yards; but after that keep your
head down and stay under your screen. Got it?"
"Keep my head down and stay under my screen."
The encumbrance of the heavy blanket of leaves made movement more difficult
than ever. Tallon sweltered under the plastic as he struggled along behind
the doctor, deprived of even the meager companionship of the sonar torch's
electronic voice in his ear. He had had to switch it off as soon as the
screen was pulled over his head.
They inched their way forward for two hours before Tallon noticed that the
going was getting easier. Gradually there was less backtracking to do,
fewer floundering escapes from seemingly bottomless wells of slime. He
began to think about the possibility of walking upright in fresh air,
of being clean and dry, of eating again.
Suddenly, up ahead, Winfield gave a hoarse scream.
"Doc! What is it?" Tallon heard violent splashing sounds, and cursed
his blind helplessness. "What's wrong, Doc?"
"A spider. A big one. . . ." The doctor screamed again, and the splashing
grew louder.
Tallon threw aside the burden of leaves and crept forward as quickly as
he could, expecting at any moment to put his unprotected hand far down
into a cold wet mouth.
"Where are you, Doc? Can you see me?"
"This way, son. That's far enough. Hold out your left hand."
Tallon did as he was told and felt something light and brittle drop into
his fingers. It was the eyeset. He put it on and was jolted with green
blurs of brilliant light. Winfield had dropped the birdcage, and Tallon
found himself looking at an unearthly scene through the slime-streaked
plastic. At first he did not recognize the mud-splattered starfish shape
that was himself or the other writhing one that was Winfield.
The doctor was lying on his back, and his right leg was sunk up to the knee
in a seething patch of turbulence. Red stains were spreading in the churning
water, and around its perimeter eight jointed stalks whipped and quivered
in the air. Moaning with dismay, Tallon oriented himself and lunged sideways
for the spear, which had dropped clear of Winfield's hand. He lifted it
and drove the point down through the mud toward where he guessed the
muck spider's body to be. The surface of the water heaved sluggishly,
and the spear twisted in his grasp.
"Hold on, Doc. I'm using the spear on it."
"It won't work that way. Skin too tough. Got -- got to go down the throat.
Give me the spear."
Tallon hauled the spear back and guided it into Winfield's blindly grasping
hand. The doctor's mouth gaped silently as he took the crude weapon and
worked the point down into the water close to his leg. The green stalks
clawed eagerly at his arms, then suddenly sprang upright.
"I'm getting there," Winfield grunted. "I'm getting it."
He grasped the spear higher up on its shaft and triumphantly began to go
up it, hand over hand. The surface of the swamp all around him convulsed
as his weight bore down on the vibrating spear. Tallon, crouched close by,
was totally absorbed in the struggle when silent alarms began to sound in
his head. Winfield was winning his battle, but there was another danger,
something they were forgetting.
"Doc!" he shouted. " You're standing up!"
Winfield froze for an instant, looking guilty rather than afraid, and
was dropping to the ground when the missile claimed him.
Tallon heard the incredible impact, the subway roar of the missile's
flight arriving in its wake, and he glimpsed the doctor's headless body
cartwheeling away over the water. Seconds later came the tardy, rolling
echoes of the rifle shot. The spear still stood upright in the mud,
rocking slightly with the movements of the unseen spider.
That was a stupid action, Tallon thought numbly; you weren't supposed
to stand up, Doc. You warned me not to stand up, and then
you
stood
up. He crouched on his hands and knees for several seconds, shaking his
head bewilderedly; then the anger returned, the same anger that had let
him carry Cherkassky out through a hotel window into the thin air high
above New Wittenburg.
Tallon wiped the slime off the plastic cover of the bird cage to give himself
a better view of his own actions; then he crept to the spear. Ignoring the
beating of the jointed green stalks, he pulled the spear up and drove it
back down into the same spot again and again, until the water was whorled
with cream-colored fluid. Pulling the spear up for the last time,
he went in search of Winfield's body. He found it in a shallow pool,
already shrouded in a shimmering cloak of leeches.
"I'm sorry, Doc," he said aloud, "but Earth expects you to do one more thing.
And I know you would want to oblige."
Tallon worked the tip of the spear into a fold in the plastic of the
doctor's suit, and groaning with the effort, levered the body into an
upright position. He was much closer this time, and the impact of the
second missile stunned his senses as the spear and its grisly burden
were ripped from his fingers. Tallon collected the bird and the supply
pack, then draped himself in the heavy screen of dringo leaves. He moved
forward for another four hours before he risked making a tiny opening
in the overlapping leaves and holding the bird cage close to it.
He had almost reached the northern edge of the swamp, and far ahead,
with sunlight gleaming on its upper surfaces, the slim pylon of a rattler
rifle soared up above the mists. Tallon had no way of knowing if he was
looking at the rifle that had killed Logan Winfield, but somewhere along
the line one of the sentient machines would be registering two missiles
fired. To the Pavilion security force, two missiles fired would mean
that two prisoners had terminated their sentences.
Beyond the slender pylon Tallon glimpsed the sloping gray uplands of
the continent's spinal ridge. He settled down, with the bird cage held
tight in his arms, to wait for night and the start of the real journey.
There were still a thousand miles to New Wittenburg -- and eighty thousand
portals to Earth.
ten
Tallon passed through the line of pylons at dusk.
He guessed the declination of the rifles would be limited to the edge
of the swamp and beyond, but he stayed beneath the screen anyway, and
the crawling feeling between his shoulder blades remained there until he
had safely crossed the line. His first action on the other side was to
cut away the plastic envelope, wrap it inside the leaves, and hide the
bundle in a clump of prickly shrub. Working quickly, he took Ariadne II
out of her cage, tied her leg to the epaulette of his prison uniform,
and climbed the palisade that kept the general public from straying into
the rattlers' domain.
The exhilaration of freedom, of walking like a human being on firm ground
again, sustained Tallon as he moved diagonally over the rocky foothills
marking the beginning of a mountain chain that straggled the whole length
of the continent. When he had gained a little height he saw the trembling,
varicolored lights of a small town clustered in the curve of a bay about
five miles distant. The awesome planetary ocean stretched blackly away to
the west, pricked here and there by the navigation lights of trawlers. He
breathed deeply, savoring his release from the Pavilion, as well as the
release from all pressures of human identity -- a feeling one gets when
nobody in the whole universe knows where he is or even if he exists.
At that moment the journey Tallon was about to attempt seemed absurdly
easy. This, had he lived, would have been Winfield's hour of triumph,
Tallon knew. But the doctor was dead, and dead again.
Suddenly Tallon was tired and hungry and aware that he stank. There were
no lights visible between him and the town -- the ground appeared too
rough for any sort of farming -- so he headed down again to the water's
edge. On the way he searched in Winfield's pack and found, in addition
to the green guards' uniforms, a flashlight, soap, and depilatory cream.
There were also several bars of candy -- more reminders of the old
doctor's years of patient work toward a day he was never going to see.
Standing on the pebbles of the narrow beach, Tallon stripped and washed
in the cold sea. Keeping only his boots, he put on the fresh clothing
and was relieved to find that one of the stretch-fabric uniforms fit him
well enough. He tied the unprotesting bird to one shoulder, slung the
pack over the other, and began walking north.
At first it seemed a good idea to stick to the beach in preference to
the rock-strewn hillside, but as he walked it became obvious that there
was no real beach. Mostly there was just a tiny strip of rough pebbles,
and in many places tough grasses grew right to the water's edge. After
he'd been stumbling along the uneven stones for a while Tallon remembered
he was not going to find any stretches of smooth sand. Emm Luther had no
moon, which meant it had practically no tides, and therefore no beaches
and no sand.
If only there were a moon, darling, we could have a moonlit picnic on
the beach , he thought,
if only there were a beach.
Munching the candy, he moved a little farther inland, with the intention of
walking until he was perhaps half a mile from the town, and then trying to
get some rest; but an unexpected occurrence forced him to change his plans.
Ariadne II went to sleep. Tallon flicked the bird with his finger a few
times, and she opened her eyes for a couple of seconds, but closed them
again, plunging him into darkness. He felt annoyed, but this soon passed
when he considered what she had been through on his behalf.
In all probability any Earthside species of bird would have died from
over-adrenalation long before this.
He lay down and tried to sleep. Although he was almost as far south as it
was possible to go on Emm Luther and still remain on dry land, winter was
just beginning to blend into spring and the night was cold. A long time
went by before he achieved unconsciousness, and then he had dreams --
of talking to Winfield, of dancing with Helen Juste, of flying up and
up into the coppery light of dawn with the long-shadowed land falling
away below. This last was very vivid. There was a tiny figure of a man
in a dark green uniform lying down there on the grass. Tallon moved,
clutching frantically for support.
He was flying!
Horizons of sea and
land rotated sickeningly, and there was nothing under him but air.
His fingers sank into wiry grass. He became aware of the pressure of
the hard ground against his back, and came fully awake. The visions
of wheeling land and sea persisted, but now he knew what was causing
them. Ariadne II had worked herself free and had escaped while she had
the chance. The pictures grayed out as she passed beyond the range of
the eyeset.
Her loss presented him with another problem -- finding new eyes and using
them to get hold of some food. He had to get something solid to eat in
a hurry. The candy had given his blood sugar a temporary boost, but the
overstimulatjon of the pancreas, which always accompanies the intake
of neat carbohydrate, had flooded his system with sugar~amnihilating
insulin. The result was that his blood sugar had dropped even farther
below the fasting level, and now he could hardly stand without his knees
buckling. He wished the doctor had thought enough about the nutrition
problems of a blind man on the run to have included milk solids or some
other convenient form of protein in the escape kit. But that was not
getting him any closer to the space terminal at New Wittenburg.
Tallon put the eyeset on "search and hold" and picked up seabirds cruising
over the water near the shore. He got more aerial views of the ocean dressed
in its early morning grays, the tousled hillside, and his own dark green
figure. This was good enough to let him continue walking north. It was
still very early in the morning, and he reached the outskirts of the town
just as the place was coming awake. He was able to switch to the eyes of
men driving to work at dawn. None of them seemed to pay attention to him.
For a while Tallon was content to walk free along the quiet thoroughfares,
marveling at how Earth-like his surroundings were. The big northern city
of Testament, where he had spent most of his time while on Emm Luther,
had a character of its own that was unlike anything on Earth; but small
towns were small towns no matter where you went in the galaxy. The neat
bungalows, sleeping in the morning stillness, were the same as those
he had seen on half a dozen worlds; and the children's tricycles, lying
on the front lawns, were painted red, because human children the galaxy
over liked them that way.
Why should a man choose one planet and say, this one I will put above all
others? If be survived the psychic disembowelment of the flicker-transits
and arrived on yet another miraculous green orb, why shouldn't that be
enough? Why carry with him the paraphernalia of political allegiances,
doctrinal conflicts, imperialism, the Block? And yet Winfield had been
blown to bits, and Sam Tallon was still carrying the location of a
brand-new planet embedded in his brain.
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