by Bob Shaw
The Conan turned out to be, by Emm Luther standards, a first-class hotel. Tallon halted in a doorway on the opposite side of the street and considered a new problem. Helen Juste was probably a minor celebrity -- as a relative of the Temporal Moderator, a member of the prison board, and a woman of some wealth -- and therefore an easy mark for the police, especially while staying at a hotel in which she was known. Walking up to the desk and asking for her could be the last mistake he would get the chance to make.
He decided to wait where he was and watch for her either leaving or entering the hotel. Half an hour went by and it seemed an eternity; Tallon began to feel he should move on. Then he had another thought: How did he know Helen was in there at all? She could have been taken away already, or unable to get a room, or she could have changed her mind. He dithered for another ten minutes, until Seymour began to get restless and started tugging on his trouser leg. Tallon got an idea; the dog seemed to be intelligent, so why not . . . ?
"Listen, boy," Tallon whispered, hunkering down beside Seymour. "Find Helen. In there. Find Helen. " He pointed to the hotel entrance, where several groups were standing and talking.
Through the eyes of a passerby Tallon saw Seymour scramble across the street and disappear, with wagging tail, into the lobby. He reselected Seymour's vision signals and immediately was weaving an uncertain course through the lobby, only a few inches above the carpet. There were more close-ups of stairs, skirting boards, and door jambs. Tallon, fascinated by the dog's progress, could almost hear him sniffing as he tried for Helen's scent. Finally he was looking at the base of a white door, saw forefeet paw at it, and then Helen's face appeared, curious, surprised, laughing.
When she carried Seymour out to the street Tallon glimpsed his own gray-clad figure waiting in the doorway across the street. He waved, and she crossed the street and came over to him.
"Sam! What's happened to you? You look -- "
"There's no time, Helen. Do you still want to try flicker-transits?"
"You know I do. What do I need to pack?"
"There's no time for packing either." Having got this far, Tallon suddenly felt sick with anxiety, with the feeling that his luck couldn't hold out. "If you've got cab fare we'll leave right now."
"All right, Sam. I've got the cab fare."
With Seymour under his arm, Tallon took Helen's hand, and they started walking and looking for a cruising taxi. He explained most of the situation to her as they walked. A few minutes later they caught a vacant robo-cab. Tallon fell back in the seat while Helen punched out their destination and fed a bill into the waiting rollers. His nerves were twanging a thin fierce tune, like high-tension cables in a gale. He wanted to scream. Even touching Helen and looking at her made no difference; the whole universe was falling in on him, and he would have to run very, very fast.
In the last block before the space terminal, Tallon reached out and pressed the button that stopped the cab. They got out and walked the rest of the way, Tallon's instincts making him feel safer on the ground.
"When we get to the entrance," he said, "we'll have to separate for a few minutes. I'm supposed to be a Paranian crewman, so I go in by the staff entrance on the right. You get a sightseer's ticket and go in at one of the other doors. We'll meet at this end of the main north-bound slideway."
"Will it be all right, Sam? Surely nobody can simply walk onto a ship, without formalities, and fly away."
"Don't worry. Terminals like this are too big for centralized customs and emigration checks. There's a field neutralizer in every docking cradle that prevents the ship in it from lifting off until the customs and migration teams have worked it over."
"Isn't that just as bad from our point of view?"
"This is no ordinary ship. It'll have something on board to jam the neutralizer. We won't have to wait for any checks."
"But your people won't be expecting you to bring me aboard."
"Trust me, Helen. Everything's going to be fine." Tallon stretched his lips into a smile. He hoped it looked better than it felt.
Approaching the black tunnel of the crew entrance, Tallon felt icy sweat break out on his forehead. When Seymour's eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the tunnel Tallon discovered that nothing had changed. The same bored-looking clerk glanced perfunctorily at his papers; the same plainclothes men lounged in the cramped office. Tallon picked up his papers, walked on through to the sunlit edge of the field, and saw Helen waiting. She looked impossibly perfect, smiling as though they were going to a dance, Tallon thought, and had instinctive feeling that she was not a good dancer.
Tallon's gloom increased, though he could not pinpoint its cause. Then as they stepped onto the slideway the idea that had been prowling the hinterlands of his subconscious rose to the surface.
"Helen," he said, "how far is it from here to the Pavilion?"
"Something like a thousand miles -- a bit more; I'm not certain."
"A long way for a blind man to travel without being picked up, especially when somebody like Cherkassky is on his tail."
"Well, you said you had been lucky."
"That's what's worrying me -- I was never lucky before. I get the feeling that Cherkassky might be playing games. Picking me up on the road wouldn't be much of a feather in his cap; but suppose he let me get to where I was going first? Then he could net himself an Earth ship and its crew."
Helen looked subdued. "He'd be taking a big responsibility on himself."
"Perhaps not. The negotiations on Akkab over territorial acquisitions have broken down, but a lot of people in the empire think the Lutherians are holding on too tight, acting like dogs in a manger. It would suit Emm Luther quite well if a fat, juicy incident occurred -- for example, a Block-owned ship disguised as a Paranian merchantman being caught in the act of smuggling out a spy."
The breeze began to flick Helen's hair as they moved over onto the higher speed strips of the slideway. She held the coppery strands in place with spread fingers.
"What are you going to do, Sam? Go back?"
Tallon shook his head. "I've quit going back. And, besides, I could be overestimating Cherkassky. This might be entirely my own idea and not his. It's funny, though, that I was able to walk into the city and to your hotel without any bother from either side. Lucky again, it seems."
"It seems."
"We'll get off this thing a little early, just in case."
They stepped off the slideway at N.125, three rows short of the one in which he had encountered Tweedie. Tallon noticed that Helen was still wearing her green uniform and did not look at all out of place in the anonymous activity of the field. Everything -- from the ships themselves to the cargo-handling plant and cargo pallets -- was on such a huge scale that two extra specks of humanity were all but invisible. It took them twenty minutes to reach the end of the row and start moving northward again. Tallon stopped when he saw the green centaur of Parane on the prow of a fat, silver-gray vessel up ahead.
"Can you read the name on that ship? Seymour's a little near-sighted."
Helen shaded her eyes from the lowering sun. "Lyle Star."
"That's the one."
He caught her arm, drew her into the lee of a line of cargo pallets stacked high with crates, and they began walking again, keeping out of the line of sight of anyone who might be watching from the ship. As he got closer Tallon saw that none of the cradles adjacent to the Lyle Star were occupied. It could be coincidence -- or it could be that somebody had cleared a space for action. The ship itself was completely sealed up into flight configuration, except for the crew entrance door lying open near the nose. There was no sign of life on or near the vessel.
"It doesn't look right," Tallon said, "and it doesn't look wrong. I think we ought to hide somewhere and watch things for a while."
They moved closer, crossing open spaces only when lumbering mobile cranes provided cover, and got to within about a hundred yards of the Lyle Star. The light was fading, and the day crews were beginning to thin out to
the point where the presence of two unauthorized persons might seem suspicious. Tallon looked around for a hiding place and decided on a crane parked close by. He brought Helen over to the massive yellow machine, which towered over their heads. Opening an inspection hatch in the engine compartment, Tallon brought out his papers and stood glancing from them to the open hatch and back again, hoping he looked like a maintenance inspector at work.
"Make sure nobody's watching you," he ordered, "then get inside."
Helen gave a gasp of surprise and did as she was told. Tallon checked his surroundings, got in after her, and closed the hatch. In the choking, oil-smelling darkness they edged their way round the great rotary engines to the side of the crane nearest the Lyle Star. A row of ventilation louvers gave them a good view of the ship and the intervening area of concrete.
"I'm sorry about this bit of nonsense," Tallon said. "I suppose you feel like a kid hiding in a hollow bush?"
"Something like that," she whispered, and moved closer to him in the blackness. "Do you often do this sort of thing?"
"It isn't usually this ludicrous, but the job does get pretty childish sometimes. As far as I can see, nearly all so-called affairs of state require at least one unfortunate to crawl along a sewer on his belly, or the like."
"Why don't you quit?"
"I intend to. That's why I don't want to risk walking into Cherkassky's arms at this stage of the game."
"But you don't really think he's in that ship?"
Tallon held Seymour to the nearest louver to see out. "No; it's just a possibility. But things look too quiet over there."
"Can't you tune your eyeset to someone inside and see who's there?"
"Good idea, but it doesn't work; I've just tried it. The signals are highly directional, and the hull must be too thick to let them through anywhere but at the direct vision panels -- and they're all right up at the top of the nose section."
"How long do we wait in here then?" Helen had begun to sound depressed.
"Just till it gets a little darker; then we'll try Seymour. If he'll go in through the airlock, I should be able to keep in touch with him long enough to see if there's a reception party inside."
When the sun had gone down and the blue lights blazed on the perimeter of the field, Tallon eased the little dog down onto the concrete, out through the ground-clearance space, and pointed him toward the ship. Seymour wagged his tail uncertainly and trotted toward the dark hull of the Lyle Star. Using Helen's eyes for a moment, Tallon watched the dog wander across the apron and up the short ramp. At the top, Seymour was silhouetted for a moment against the lemon-colored rays pouring from the ship's interior. Tallon pushed Seymour's stud on the eyeset just in time to get a dog's eye view of a booted foot lashing toward him.
Tallon, crouched in the crane's engine compartment a hundred yards away, heard Seymour's startled yelp. A few moments later the dog had returned to the crane and was shivering in Tallon's arms. Tallon soothed the terrier as he wondered what the next move should be.
It had been only a fraction of a second, but it was all he'd needed to recognize the blond, chunky sergeant who had assisted Cherkassky with the brain-brush the night they'd tried to erase Tallon's mind.
eighteen
Some time before dawn Tallon began to get persistent cramps in his legs. He worked furiously at the knotted muscles, wondering if the drug was wearing off or if it was a natural effect of the cold.
"What's the matter, darling?" Helen's voice was sleepy.
"My legs are killing me. Forty is far too old for perching all night on a cold engine block. What time is it?"
"My watch is back in the hotel. It must be near morning, though; I can hear birds."
"Birds are fine, but if you hear any people moving about in the cabin above us, get ready to move out." He put his arm around Helen's shoulders. She felt small and cold, and suddenly he was sorry for her. "Perhaps we should move out, anyway. Nobody's going to leave the ship."
"But if you go back into the city you'll be picked up sooner or later. Your only chance of getting back to Earth is here at the terminal."
"Some chance."
There was a long silence before Helen replied, and when she did her voice was crisp and cool -- just as it had been when he first heard her in the Pavilion. "They'd come out if I told them where you were, Sam. I could go in to the ship and say you were hiding out in another part of the field."
"Forget it."
"But listen, Sam. I could say I had just got away from you while you were asleep, and you were getting ready to jump some other ship."
"I said forget it. Cherkassky, or whoever's in there, would hear the plot mechanism creaking. Stories like that never work, not on a professional, anyway. When you tell a lie, you've got to make it so outrageous that everybody will believe it, because you wouldn't say a thing like that unless it were true; or, better still, tell the truth, but do it in such a way that -- " Tallon stopped abruptly as he got an icy blast of insight into the meaning of his own words.
"Helen, did they tell you in the Pavilion why I was arrested in the first place?"
"Yes. You'd found out how to get to Aitch Mühlenberg."
"What would you say if you were told I still had that information?"
"I'd say it was a lie. All that was erased, and you were checked and rechecked."
"You'd be underestimating Earth, Helen. The colonies forget how good we can be at some things. It's bound to happen, I guess. When you start off from scratch on a new planet, there's bound to be a shift in priorities -- one type of frontier is extended, another is drawn back."
"What are you getting round to telling me, Sam?"
Tallon told her about the capsule that had snapped shut on a fragment of his brain, protecting it from all psychical and physical erasures, preserving in its submolecular circuits the information wanted by the Block. He felt Helen go rigid as he spoke.
"So that's why your people are taking so much trouble to get you back," she said finally. "I didn't realize I was helping you to hand a whole planet over to Earth. This makes a difference."
"You bet it makes a difference," he said. "Don't you know there's going to be a war over that planet? If I get safely out of here that war won't take place."
"Of course it won't take place; Earth will have what she wants."
"I'm not thinking in terms of governments," Tallon said urgently. "All that matters is the people, the civilians, the kids on red tricycles, who won't have to die if I get back to the Block."
"We all feel that way, but the fact remains that -- "
"I could have gotten away," Tallon interrupted quietly. "I was at the ship and I turned back."
"Don't sound so tragic; it doesn't work with me. We've already decided that the security police planned to let you lead them to the ship. Even if it had got off the ground, there would have been interceptors of some kind between here and the portal."
"All right. So I would probably be dead. There would have been no megadeaths on my conscience."
"Your nobility routine is even worse than mine was."
"I'm sorry," Tallon said stiffly. "My sense of humor seems to have atrophied in the past few months."
Helen laughed delightedly. "Now you're actually being pompous." She leaned against him and kissed his cheek impulsively. Her face felt cold against his. "I'm sorry, Sam. You're right, of course. What do you want me to do?"
Tallon explained his idea.
An hour later, in the pewter light of dawn, Tallon checked the ammunition in the automatic and stretched his legs in preparation for running.
His idea was a simple one, but there was a 90 percent probability that Helen would be separated from him when they put it into practice. And this time there would be no turning back. In the dew-chilled darkness of the crane's engine compartment they faced that probability and accepted it. It was fully understood on both sides that even if he got off the ground -- good though his ship would be, even by Earth standards -- he might not reach
the portal; and if he did reach it, their personal futures would diverge as sharply as those of their native worlds. They had said goodbye.
The plan was for Helen to make her way back to the slideway, unseen from the ship, then approach it in the normal way in full view. Her story was to be that Tallon had forced her to drive him to the city, and that she had been imprisoned after he had contacted the New Wittenburg cell members. Tallon had gone back there when he realized a trap was waiting for him on the Lyle Star. She was to give an address in the warehouse belt, and say she had escaped while Tallon and the others were sleeping. Afraid they would be waiting for her near the police stations or out on the streets, she had decided to go to the space terminal, the one place the Earthsiders would avoid. Then she was to tell them about the capsule.
