Night Walk

by Bob Shaw

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  B60-110 * 60c

  Night

  Walk

  by Bob Shaw

  Sightless, marooned on a prison

  planet, Sam Tallon faces a

  desperate odyssey -- to save the

  Universe that had disowned him.

  Eyeless On Emm Luther . . .

  In the prison's secret workshop, Tallon fumbled

  for the eyeset Dr. Winfield held out to him. It

  would allow him to "see" again -- by receiving

  visual signals from others' normal eyes and

  beaming them on his own optic nerves.

  The device felt like thick-lensed glasses.

  Hogarth stood ready to provide the signals.

  Tallon licked his lips. "What are the chances,

  Doc?"

  Winfield shrugged. "We can always try again."

  TalIon sighed, lifted the set to his eyes.

  Then he screamed.

  Light -- fierce and steady.

  Pain -- fierce and steady!

  Night

  Walk

  Bob Shaw

  A BANNER BOOK

  This Banner Edition is the first publication

  in any form of Night Walk.

  A BANNER BOOK

  Published by The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1967 by Bob Shaw.

  Published by arrangement with the author.

  All rights reserved, which includes the right

  to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

  any form whatsoever. For information address

  Ted White, 339 49 Street, Brooklyn, New York 11220.

  First Banner Printing, September, 1967

  BANNER TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK -- MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  one

  A winter night, sharp and frozen, had moved in over New Wittenburg, pressing down hard on the bitter streets, laying uneven swaths of frost on the concrete desert of the space terminal.

  Tallon leaned against the window of his room, looking out. The long hours of night lay ahead, and he wondered how he was going to get through. Not even the possibility of passing through the eighty thousand portals that led to Earth could ease his depression. He had dozed on top of the rumpled bedclothes for several hours, and during that time the world seemed to have died. The hotel felt empty.

  He lit a cigarette and exhaled a gentle river of smoke that coursed flatly along the glass of the window. Little circular areas of condensation formed on the inside of the glass, centered on droplets that clung to the outside. Were they going to come for him? The question was a dull ache that had gnawed at him since he made the pickup a week earlier.

  Normally the probability of success would have been high, but this time there were things Tallon did not like. He drew hard on the heady smoke, making the cigarette crackle faintly. It had been lousy luck, McNulty having a heart attack just when he did; but it had also been an error on the part of someone back in the Block. What in hell were they doing, putting a man into the field without making absolutely certain he couldn't get sick? McNulty had panicked after his attack and had made an unorthodox transfer that still shocked Tallon every time he remembered its clumsiness. He ground the cigarette under his shoe and swore to make somebody pay for the mistake when he got back to the Block. If he got back to the Block.

  By a conscious effort he denied himself another cigarette. The room seemed to have grown smaller in the week he had stayed there. Hotels on Emm Luther were on the bottom of the scale as far as comfort and amenities went. His room was not inexpensive, yet it contained nothing but a bed with a smudged headboard, and a few shabby pieces of furniture. A cobweb waved forlornly from the warm air vent. The walls were a kind of bureaucrat green -- the color of despair.

  Sucking in air through his teeth in a hiss of disgust, Tallon returned to the window and leaned his forehead on the chill glass. He looked out across the throbbing lights of the alien city, noting the subtle effect of the higher gravity in the architecture of the towers and spires -- a reminder that he was far from home.

  Eighty thousand portals there were between here and Earth, representing uncountable millions of light-years; curtains of star systems, layer upon layer of them, made it impossible to pick out even the loose cluster of which Sol was a part. Too far; much too far. Loyalties were stretched too thin over those distances. Earth, the need for new portals, the Block -- at this distance, what did it all mean?

  Tallon suddenly realized he was hungry. He switched on a light and examined himself in the room's single mirror. His straight black hair was slightly untidy. The long, rather serious face -- which might have been that of an accountant or a jazz player with a leaning toward theory -- was shaded with stubble, but he decided it was unlikely to attract attention. Momentarily and childishly pleased at the thought of eating, he ran a comb through his hair, turned off the light, and opened the door.

  He was stepping out into the corridor when the first smell of danger came to him. The hotel was quiet. And now that he thought of it, no vehicle had passed along the normally busy street below his window during the whole time he had stood there.

  Snuffling with panic, wiping his upper lip with the back of his hand, Tallon went back into his room and edged the window open a little. The unsteady murmur of city traffic billowed into the room on the cold air; and yet nothing was moving in the one thoroughfare immediately below. Would they go to all that trouble? He pulled his jaw sideways, frowning in thought, then realized he was deceiving himself by simulating doubt. For what he had in his memory they would seal off the city, the continent, the whole planet of Emm Luther.

  It's happening to me, he thought, but a wave of irritation submerged his fear. Why did everybody have to stick so carefully to the rules? Why was it that if somebody on your side made a mistake, somebody on their side always chopped you for it? Were they not going to make an exception, even for Sam Tallon, the center of the universe?

  Moving with sudden feverish speed, he locked the door and dragged his suitcase out of the closet. There was something that should have been done earlier, and his forehead prickled at the thought of the risk he had taken by delaying so long. He took his old-style transistor radio from the case, removed its battery, and went to the mirror. Ducking his head slightly, Tallon parted the hair on his left temple and worked through it until he had isolated two silver strands. He raised the battery to his forehead, and after a moment's hesitation, pressed the gleaming strands to its terminals.

  Eyes opaque with pain, rocking slightly on his feet, Tallon slowly and clearly recited the information. It took only a few seconds for him to go through the four groups of digits. When he had finished he reversed the battery and, with a longer hesitation, made the connection again. This time it really hurt as the pea-sized capsule implanted in his brain snapped itself shut, imprisoning a fragment of the living tissue.

  He put the battery back in the radio, found the metallic hairs again, and jerked them from his scalp. Tallon smiled wryly. It had been easier than he had expected. The Lutherians usually avoided killing people, partly because it was the planetary government's official creed, but mainly because their knowledge of hypnotic techniques had advanced far enough to make it unnecessary. If he was taken, the first thing they would do would be to use a brain-brush on him to wipe out what he had learned. But now it would fail. Even if he were to be killed, the Block would find a sorrowing relative to apply for the return of his body to Earth, and the pea-sized fragment of his brain would still be alive in its beautifully engineered cocoon. The Block woud be able t
o extract what it wanted to know.

  Tallon wondered coolly if, in spite of all the assurances, a tiny frightened ghost of his own personality would still be there in that dark little cell -- alive and screaming when the electrodes came blindly probing. I'm getting too pessimistic, he thought. It must be an occupational disease. Who says I'm going to die?

  He took the flat, high-velocity automatic from his pocket and weighed it in his hand. The Block would expect him to use it, even though Earth and Emm Luther were not officially at war. When the capsule had been implanted in his head there had been an unwritten, unspoken clause in the agreement. With the information locked up tight, preserved independent of his own life, the Block would rather he got himself killed and shipped back home than be locked safely away in an escape-proof prison. Nobody had even hinted at the clause -- he would have quite on the spot if they had; but it was there just the same. And the best way to get killed would be to start shooting at members of the E.L.S.P. Tallon unloaded the automatic, threw it in a drawer, and dropped the clip into the wastebasket.

  The strings of digits he had memorized were the coordinates of the new portal, plus the jump bearing and jump increment involved, which the luck of the galactic draw had awarded to Emm Luther rather than to Earth. They represented nothing less than one brand-new Earth-type planet. He, Sam Tallon, was the possessor of perhaps the most important single secret in the universe. But he was not going to die for it -- not for anything or anybody. All he owed the Block was a reasonable attempt at escaping. He lit a fresh cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Somewhere in the city of New Wittenburg there was a specialist whose name and address Tallon did not know. The specialist would contact him when it was safe. His job was to administer the drug pack, the treatment, which by both physical and psychosomatic means would alter Tallon's appearance sufficiently to get him through the check-points at the space terminal. His skin, hair, and eye pigmentation would be changed; the fingerprint patterns would be altered; even his Bertillon measurements would be changed -- by drugs that produced tensions and contractions in the body's musculature and connective tissues.

  Tallon had never had the treatment before and was unhappy at the prospect, but it would be better than sinking out of sight in a Lutherian prison. If only he could leave the hotel and stay on the loose, the specialist would find him. The problem was how to get out.

  He pulled deeply on his cigarette, almost allowed the smoke to escape from his mouth, then drew it back into his lungs. The excess made him dizzy. He lay back on his elbows and tried to assess his chances objectively.

  With full equipment there would have been six possible ways to leave his room -- the door and window, the two other walls, and the floor and ceiling -- but, thanks to McNulty, he had been forced to travel without gear. The E.L.S.P. did not know that, though, which was why they had gone to the trouble of englobing him. He guessed they were at that minute covering the street outside, the corridor, and the rooms above, below, and on each side.

  Apart from the useless automatic, he had nothing but a pair of thrust shoes in extremely doubtful condition. Assuming the others really were out there and not just a product of his nerves, the situation was about as hopeless as they come. The only course offering any hope at all was, as he had originally intended, to walk as calmly as possible toward the restaurant. A window at the end of the corridor looked out on a different street. If he got to that, there might be a slight chance.

  But this time the door to the corridor refused to open.

  Tallon twisted the handle violently and pulled with all his strength, then remembered the Block had warned him not to exert himself too much for a few hours after triggering the capsule in his head. He relaxed and backed away from the door, half expecting it to be blasted open at any second. He was caught. The only question still remaining was which of the three E.L.S.P. network executives was handling the operation. The ban on straightforward liquidation, imposed by the rigid semitheocracy that prevailed on Emm Luther, had led them to develop idiosyncratic ways of handling politically dangerous prisoners. The cardex in Tallon's memory flicked over, unbidden, turning up their names and a summary of what was likely to happen to him "accidentally while resisting arrest."

  There was Kreuger, who liked to immobilize his captives by cutting their Achilles tendons; there was Cherkassky, who filled them so full of psychoneuro drugs that they never again had a peaceful night's sleep; and finally there was Zepperitz. Zepperitz and his methods made the other two men seem almost benign.

  Suddenly appalled by his own stupidity at ever having allowed himself to be drawn into the intelligence game, Tallon drew a chair into the center of the room and sat on it. He interlocked his hands behind his back -- a neat, passive bundle -- and waited. The destruction of Tallon as a political being, begun the first time he had failed to find a recognizable constellation in Emm Luther's night sky, was complete.

  He felt cold, apprehensive, and impossibly ill.

  two

  There are roughly eighty thousand portals between Emm Luther and Earth. To make the journey home you must pass through all of them, regardless of how afraid you become, regardless of how far you feel body outstripping soul during the flicker-transits across the distant reaches of the Rim.

  Your ship reaches the first portal by diagonally breasting the galactic drift for almost five days. The portal is relatively close to Emm Luther at present, but they are separating from each other at a rate of some four miles a second. This is because the planet and its parent sun are swimming with the galactic tide, whereas the portal is an imaginary sphere anchored to a point in the immovable topography of null-space.

  If your ship carries good astrogation equipment it may enter the portal at speed; but should the computers in control have any doubt at all about their exact location, they may spend days discarding velocity and maneuvering for position. They know -- and you, sweating in your G-cell, know too -- that if the ship is not safely inside the portal when the jump takes place its passengers will never again breathe the soft thick air of Earth. The alien geometry of null-space will take care of that.

  As you wait, with dry throat and icy forehead, for the relays to strike you pray that some crazy fluke won't cast you up innumerable hopeless light-years from home. But this is human emotion at work.

  Null-space is incomprehensible, but it is not irrational. Provided every glass and metal organ in the guts of your ship is functioning properly, you could make a million jumps from A through null-space to B without the slightest mishap. The difficulties arise because null-space is not reciprocal. Having reached B, the same jump in the opposite direction will not return you to A; in fact, it will take you to any random point in the universe except A. Once that has happened there is nothing for it but to go on making more and more random leaps. If you keep it up long enough and are extremely lucky, you may emerge within reach of a habitable world, but the odds are not good.

  In the first century of interstellar exploration Earth alone dispatched some forty million robot probes, of which less than two hundred chanced to make their way back. Of that number, exactly eight had found usable planetary systems. Not one of the handful of manned ships that accidentally made open-ended jumps was ever seen again -- on Earth, anyway. Some of them may still be going, carrying the descendants of their original crews, cosmic Flying Dutchmen glimpsed only by uncomprehending stars as their destiny of flicker-transits gradually takes them beyond the reach of human thought.

  The eight successful probes of that first century established zigzagging trade lanes, which the manned ships that came afterward were very careful to follow closely. That is the other aspect of null-space travel that troubles you as you wait for the relays to act. Although it was a logical deduction from the absence of reciprocity in null-space, a few pioneers discovered the hard way that jumping from a point near A will not take you to a corresponding point near B. Get more than about two light-seconds from the established jumping-off point, the so-cal
led portal, and you are off on your own random pilgrimage to the far side of eternity.

  That is why, during the final slow seconds as you float in your G-cell and breathe the rubber-smelling air, you pray and you sweat.

  That is also why the planet Emm Luther, formerly a colony of Earth and now autonomous, jealously guarded the few strings of figures locked in Sam Tallon's brain. Emm Luther had only a single continent, and her devouring need for new breathing space equaled that of Earth itself. She had one incredible stroke of luck in a probe that found a green planet only four hundred portals out and less than two thousand back.

  All she needed was time to consolidate her hold there before the big ships -- the invincible sperm of Earth's ceaseless self-multiplication-- -- could storm the new and fertile womb.

  three

  Tallon did not have long to wait.

  His first realization that he was under attack came when he found himself dancing with Myra, a girl who had died back on Earth twenty years earlier.

  No, he whispered, I don't want this. But she was there in his arms as they slowly gyrated in the varicolored dimness of the Stardust Room. He tried to feel the hard pressure of the chair in the dingy hotel room on Emm Luther, but the effort seemed pointless, for that was part of a future which was still a long way off.