by Bob Shaw
Suddenly he was very much younger, still working for his degree in electronics, and he was holding Myra. It was all real . His eyes filled gratefully with the sight of her massive helmet of auburn hair, her whiskey-colored eyes. They moved slowly and contentedly to the sound of the music, with Myra, as always, a fraction behind the beat. She never could dance very well, he thought warmly, but there would be lots of time to work on it after they were married. In the meantime it was enough to drift on and on through pastel mists and star-shot twilight.
The ballroom tilted ponderously away. Another time, another place. He was sitting in the comfortable old bar of the Berkeley, waiting for her. Oases of orange light reflecting on paneled walls of rich dark wood. She was taking far too long, and he grew angry. Myra knew where he was waiting, so if she couldn't keep the date she could at least ring him. Probably starting to take too much for granted, expecting him to go all the way out to her place to see what was wrong. Well, he would teach her a lesson. He began to drink determinedly, vindictively -- and the horror was growing, spreading like a dark stain in spite of his frantic efforts to stop it.
Next morning. The drowsy quietness of the standards lab. The newspaper spread on the cigarette-scarred bench and, incredibly, Myra's face looking up at him from the matte plastic sheets. Her father, a sad, mumbling giant who had been deserted years before by Myra's mother, had smothered Myra with a pillow, then opened his wrists with a portable circular saw.
Dissolving colors, the searching tides of grief, again the music, and they were dancing; but this time Myra was dragging far behind the slow rhythms. She was limp and heavy. He fought to hold her up, and her breath sobbed and gurgled in his ear. . . .
Tallon screamed and clamped his fingers on the greasy arms of the chair.
"Here he comes," a voice said. "Romantic little fellow, isn't he? You never can tell just by looking at them." Somebody laughed quietly.
Tallon opened his eyes. The room was filled with men in the gray whipcords of the E.L.S.P. civil security force. They carried small arms, most of them with the fan-shaped snouts of hornet guns, but he noticed several circular muzzles belonging to a more traditional type of weapon. Their faces were amused, derisive, some of them still indented with faint pink lines left by the masks that had protected them from the psychoneuro gas.
His stomach was erupting noisily at every breath, but Tallon found the physical nausea unimportant compared with the emotional turmoil still rocking his senses. The psychic shock was mingled with an intolerable feeling of outrage, of having been invaded, slit open, and pinned to a dissecting board like a laboratory specimen. Myra, my love . . . I'm sorry. Oh, you bastards, you grinning, stinking --
He tensed for a moment, ready to dive forward, then realized he was reacting exactly as expected. This was why they had used an LSD derivative instead of a simple knockout gas. Tallon made himself relax; he could take anything Kreuger, Cherkassky, or Zepperitz could hand out, and he would prove it. He would live on, in one reasonably healthy piece, even if it was only to read every book in some prison library.
"Very good, Tallon," a voice said. "Self-control is so important in your profession." The speaker moved into Tallon's line of vision. He was a dry, thin-faced man, wearing the black coat and white dog collar of an Emm Lutherian government official. Tallon recognized the narrow face, the vertically wrinkled neck, and the incongruously lush wavy hair of Lorin Cherkassky, number two man in the security executive's hierarchy.
Tallon nodded impassively. "Good evening. I wondered -- "
"Just keep it shut," interrupted a chunky-shouldered blond who wore sergeant's chevrons.
"It's all right, Sergeant." Cherkassky waved the younger man aside. "We mustn't discourage Mr. Tallon from being communicative. He may be expected to tell us quite a lot during the next few days."
"I'll be glad to tell you all I know, of course," Tallon said quickly. "What's the point of trying to hold on to it?"
"Precisely!" Cherkassky's voice was an excited yelp, reminding Tallon of the little man's notorious instability. "What's the point? I'm glad you see it that way. Now, Mr. Tallon, will you answer one question right away?"
"What is it? Yes."
Cherkassky walked to the chest of drawers, his head making peacocklike movements on the long neck at every step, and took out the empty automatic pistol. "Where is the ammunition for this weapon?"
"In there. I threw it in the wastebasket."
"I see," Cherkassky said, stooping to retrieve the clip. "You hid it in the wastebasket."
Tallon shifted uneasily on the seat. This was too childish to be true. "I dropped it in the wastebasket. I didn't want it. I didn't want any trouble." He kept his voice low and flat.
Cherkassky nodded sympathetically. "That's what I would say if I were in your position. Yes, that's about the best thing you could say." He slid the clip into the pistol butt and handed it to the sergeant. "Don't lose this, Sergeant. It's evidence."
Tallon opened his mouth to speak, then closed it abruptly. The very childishness of the proceedings was an important part of the technique. There is nothing more galling, more frustrating, than being forced to act like an adult when everybody around you is behaving like a malicious juvenile. But he was going to take it all, without cracking.
There was a long silence during which Cherkassky watched him intently. Tallon sat perfectly motionless, trying to subdue occasional gusts of brilliant memory shards, pictures of Myra still alive, pale skin, whiskey-colored eyes. He became aware of the seat cutting into the backs of his legs and wondered if any movement on his part would bring the multiple impact of a hornet gun. Most authorities regarded it as a humane weapon, but Tallon had once accidentally stopped a full charge of the tiny drug-laden darts, and the ensuing paralysis had caused thirty minutes of agony.
As the silence stretched into minutes, without any preparations being made to remove him from the hotel, Tallon began to worry. He looked around the room, trying to find a clue, but the faces of the E.L.S.P. men remained professionally impassive. Cherkassky pottered around contentedly, smiling and shrinking back against the wall each time he met Tallon's eyes.
Tallon became aware of a peculiar sensation involving the skin of his forehead and cheeks, an icy feeling combined with waves of pinpricks passing across the individual pores. I've graduated, he thought; I'm having my first cold sweat.
Seconds later the door was bumped open, and a uniformed man came in carrying a heavy box of gray metal. He set it on a chair, glanced briefly at Tallon, and left. Cherkassky snapped his fingers, and the blond sergeant opened the box, revealing a control panel and coiled leads on plastic reels. In a shallow tray, the ten circular terminals of a brain-brush headset gleamed like tawdry jewelry.
"Now, Tallon -- time for a little editing." Cherkassky's powdery face had become businesslike.
"Here? In the hotel?"
"Why not? The longer you have the information in your head, the greater chance you have of transferring it to someone else."
"But it takes a trained psychologist to isolate any specific sequence of thoughts," Tallon protested. "You're likely to blot out whole areas of my memory that have nothing to -- " He stopped as Cherkassky's head began to make little self-satisfied swaying movements on the turkey neck. Tallon swore silently at himself. He had intended to take it all without a word, absorb anything they could hand out -- but he had begun to squeal before they had even touched him. So much for the short and spectacular career of Iron Man Tallon. He compressed his lips and sat staring straight ahead as Cherkassky positioned the linked terminals on his head. The sergeant gave a signal, and the encircling wall of gray uniforms retreated into the corridor, making the room suddenly bigger and colder. In the dismal light the single cobweb still waved inanely from the warm-air vent.
Cherkassky stood beside the chair that held the gray box, stooping slightly to make adjustments on the verniers. He ran his eyes over the dials and glanced up at Tallon's face.
"Did you
know, Tallon, that your basal resistance is abnormally low? Perhaps you perspire easily; that always lowers the skin resistance. You aren't a sweaty person, are you?" Cherkassky's nose wrinkled in distaste, and the sergeant chuckled quietly.
Tallon scowled past him toward the window. It had misted over during the time the room was crowded, and the few city lights that were visible looked like balls of illuminated cotton. He longed to be outside, breathing the sharp starry air. Myra had liked walking on frosty nights. . . .
"Mr. Tallon wants us to stop wasting time," Cherkassky said severely. "He's right, of course. Let's get down to business. Now, Tallon, just so that there are absolutely no misconceptions on either side -- you are in your present predicament because you are part of an intelligence network that by pure chance obtained details of portal coordinates, jump increment, and jump bearings of the planet Aitch Mühlenberg, a territorial acquisition of the revered government of Emm Luther. The information was transferred to you, and you have committed it to memory. Correct?"
Tallon nodded compliantly, wondering if the brain-brush would be as unpleasant as the capsule. Cherkassky picked up the remote control and poised his thumb over the red button. It dawned on Tallon that the instrument being used on him was a standard model, the same model as used by less reputable psychiatrists. He began to wonder just how unofficial his present treatment was. On Emm Luther, with its single continent run by a single world government, there had never been any need to develop the huge, highly organized intelligence and counterespionage agencies that still proliferated on Earth. For this reason the three Lutherian network executives were given an almost free hand, like contractors on any normal government undertaking, but they were answerable to the Temporal Moderator, the planet's equivalent of a president. The question was, how far was a man like Cherkassky allowed to indulge his own idiosyncrasies?
"All right, then," Cherkassky said. "We want you to focus your thoughts on the information. Try to get it nice and clean. And don't try to fool us by thinking about something else; we will be checking. I will raise my hand when I'm going to erase, which will be about five seconds from now."
Tallon worked to marshal the strings of figures, all at once desperately afraid of losing his own name. Cherkassky's hand made a preliminary movement, and Tallon fought down his panic as the figures refused to flow properly, even with his Block-trained memory, then nothing. The numerals that would have given Earth a whole new world were gone. There had been no pain, no sound, no sensation of any kind, but the vital fragment of knowledge was no longer his. As the expectation of pain faded Tallon relaxed a little.
"That wasn't too horrible, was it?" Cherkassky smoothed the thick crown of glossy hair, which seemed to thrive like a parasite at the expense of his frail, dry body. "Quite painless, I'm told."
"I didn't feel anything," Tallon conceded.
"But the information has been erased?"
"Yes. It's gone."
"Astonishing!" Cherkassky's voice became conversational. "I never fail to be astonished at what this little box of tricks can do. You know, it makes libraries unnecessary. All anyone has to do is get one book he really likes, then he can go on reading and erasing, reading and erasing for the rest of his life."
"It's an idea," Tallon said suspiciously. "Do you mind if I take this thing off now?"
"Don't even twitch your toes until Mr. Cherkassky gives the word." The blond sergeant tapped Tallon on the shoulder with his hornet gun.
"Oh, come on now, Sergeant," Cherkassky protested amiably. "You mustn't be too hard on him. After all, he has been very cooperative. Very communicative, too. I mean, look how much he told earlier about that girl he knew back on Earth. Most men keep that sort of stuff to themselves. What was her name, Tallon? Ah, I remember -- Mary."
"Myra," Tallon corrected automatically, then noticed the broadening smile on the sergeant's face.
Cherkassky's thumb had come down on the red button.
Tallon stared up into his thin, strangely triumphant face with an overwhelming feeling of having been robbed. Something, some part of him was gone. But what? He tried to explore his own mind, looking for dark gaps in his memory. There was nothing but a lingering sense of loss.
Anger came fountaining up through him then, clean and pure. Tallon felt it burn away all caution and common sense, and was grateful.
"You're filth, Cherkassky," he said quietly. "You're a disease."
The muzzle of the hornet gun came down on his shoulder, viciously, and at the same time he saw Cherkassky's thumb go for the button again. Tallon tried to throw an unwanted scrap of thought up into the forefront of his mind before the contact was made. The brittle-star is a marine animal related to the -- Blank!
Cherkassky backed away from Tallon, mouth twitching violently, thumb poised over the button. This can go on all night, Tallon thought. By morning I'll be as good as dead, because Sam Tallon is the total of all his remembered experiences and Cherkassky is going to whittle them down to nothing.
"Go ahead, Lorie," the sergeant said. "Give him another jab. Keep at him."
"I will, Sergeant, I will; but it has to be done systematically." Cherkassky had backed almost to the window, stretching the control cable to its limit. The street, Tallon remembered, was seven stories down. Not very far, but far enough.
He drove forward out of the chair, his suddenly heightened senses clearly distinguishing the sound of the chair falling, the satisfying crunch of his head into Cherkassky's face, the angry whine of the hornet gun, the splintering impact as the window gave way ... then they were out in the cold, black air, with the street lights blossoming below.
Cherkassky's body went rigid in Tallon's arms, and he screamed as they fell. Tallon fought to gain an upright position, but the higher gravity of Emm Luther was giving him very little time. He let go of Cherkassky, but Cherkassky's arms were locked around Tallon's chest like steel straps. Moaning with panic, Tallon twisted until his legs were below him. The thrust shoes, triggered automatically by the proximity of the ground, reacted forcefully. As his knees buckled under the deceleration Tallon felt Cherkassky's grip tear loose, and the little man went on down, thrashing like a hooked fish. Tallon heard the impact of his body on the footpath.
He landed on the concrete beside Cherkassky's crumpled body, the thrust of the antigrav soles increasing by inverse squares until the moment of contact. Cherkassky was still alive; that much of the plan had gone wrong. But at least Tallon was out in the open again. He turned to run and found the lead of the brain-brush dangling from the headset, which was still clinging to his scalp.
In the act of snatching it off he noticed the movement of gray uniforms in the doorways of the shopping center across the empty street. Whistles shrilled at both ends of the block. A fraction of a second later he heard the hornet guns in action, and then he was caught in a whining cloud of darts, which made a rapid thock-thock-thock as they stitched his clothes to his body.
Tallon reeled and went down, helpless.
He lay on his back, paralyzed, and found a moment of strange peace. The E.L.S.P. men were still blasting away zealously with their hornet guns, but lying down he made a poor target for the horizontal swarms of darts, and they were not getting to him. The stars, even in their unfamiliar constellations, looked good. Up there were other men who, provided they had courage enough to stand the random galaxy-wide pattern of flicker~transits spreading their souls thin across the universe, were free to travel. Sam Tallon could no longer take part in that awesome commerce, but he would never be completely a prisoner while he could look into the night skies.
The hornet guns abruptly ceased firing. Tallon listened for the sound of running feet, but instead heard a movement unexpectedly close by.
A figure moved into his field of view and, incredibly, it was Cherkassky. His face was a voodoo mask of flayed skin and blood, and one arm hung awkwardly at his side. He moved his good hand forward painfully, and Tallon saw that it held a hornet gun.
"No man," Che
rkassky whispered "no man has ever . . ." He fired the gun at point-blank range.
Hornet guns were regarded as a humane weapon, and usually they did no lasting damage, but Cherkassky was a professional. Tallon, completely immobilized by the drugs, could not even blink as the darts ripped viciously into his eyes, robbing him forever of light and beauty and stars.
four
For Tallon there was no pain; that would come only when the paralysis drug began to be absorbed by his system. At first he was not even sure of what had happened, for darkness did not come at once. Instead, his distorted view of Cherkassky and the wavering gun muzzle was replaced by an incoherent universe of light -- splintering flashes, marching geometric patterns of color, pine-tree shapes of amethyst and pink.
But there was no escaping the processes of logic. A hornet-gun charge from a distance of twelve inches . . .
