by Bob Shaw
There was no way back.
He could make another jump, and another, and another -- until his food ran out or he died of old age -- the flicker-transits stitching him here and there across the star fields of infinity. But no matter how many random jumps he made, his chances of ever emerging within reach of a habitable planet were still so small as to be virtually nonexistent. As he grew older, sitting in the same chair, he would see almost every manifestation of matter and energy -- single stars, binaries, multiples, formless gas clouds, wheels -- except that he would, of course, be blind within a few hours.
Tallon snapped out of the descending spiral and turned his attention to Seymour, who was lying in his lap, trembling slightly, curled around the dark wound. The breath-seeking pulsations of his belly were coming more rapidly, but with less vigor. Tallon was pretty sure that Seymour was dying.
He took off his jacket, folded it into a kind of nest on top of the control console for the negative gravity propulsion system, and laid the little dog in it. Seymour was having trouble keeping his eyes open, and Tallon kept getting momentary blackouts. He got up and began to look around for a medical kit, feeling the artificial gravity dragging at his feet. The field was designed to reproduce a man's normal Earth weight, but as it originated right in the floor plates and was subject to the inverse square law, the lower part of the body always felt much heavier than the head and arms.
There were no medical supplies visible anywhere on the control deck within Seymour's restricted view, and to search the other compartments would mean taking Seymour along. Tallon hesitated, undecided. He was going to need food, and it would be better to organize it while he was able to see what he was doing.
"I'm sorry, Seymour," he said. "This'll be your last job."
Tallon gently took the dog up in his arms and moved aft. The Lyle Star was basically a conventional freighter, with a half deck in the nose, most of its drive components in the tail, and a cylindrical center body for cargo. Its control room, crew quarters, and stores occupied the half deck, and underneath were astrogation equipment, power plants for internal services, and miscellaneous stores. At the rear of the half deck a lateral catwalk looked into the cavernous hold. The rear of the hold was stacked with bales of dried protein plants, but the forward end was clear, the cargo lashing rings neatly tucked into their recesses. Tallon knew the ship was armed, but he could see no evidence of weapon systems and concluded the Block had begun using some very sophisticated stuff since he had last been on one of their ships.
He looked around the little galley, noting that the inventory gauges of the victual supply magazines showed reserves that would last him at least fifteen years. The thought of spending that length of time in darkness and then starving to death was utterly depressing. He hurried out of the galley and began trying other doors, looking briefly into empty rooms.
What an ending, he thought: what a miserable, futile way to finish up. Ever since men had first learned how to boost payloads into space beyond the reach of gravity, they had been littering the cosmos with metal shells containing everything from pans of microbes to nuclear warheads. But an intelligent alien who chanced upon the Lyle Star would find the most baffling piece of cosmic garbage yet -- a man with brown plastic buttons for eyes and a dying dog in his arms, wandering around an empty ship. No alien was going to come aboard, however, because none of the millions of stellar probes had ever found evidence of intelligent . . .
Clang-ang-ang-ng-ng! Metal collided with metal somewhere near the airlock. The echoes faded away in the vast spaces of the hold.
Tallon's knees almost buckled as the shock wave surged along his nerves. He was in a narrow corridor whose aft end opened on the catwalk skirting the hold, and he would be able to see what had caused the sound by going to the end and looking over the handrail. Tallon walked toward the dark rectangle, then stepped out onto the catwalk. A black shape was moving on the lower deck, close to the inner door of the lock.
It was Lorin Cherkassky.
He looked up, and Tallon saw that he had a bloody gash on his forehead and that he was still holding a pistol. They faced each other in silence for several throbbing seconds. Cherkassky gave a prim, icy smile, his head making slight rocking movements on the long turkey neck. Tallon involuntarily took a step back.
" There you are, Tallon," Cherkassky said amiably. "And with your little friend, too."
"Don't try to come up here." Tallon said it for lack of anything else to say.
Cherkassky shrank back against the metal wall, still smiling. "Tallon, you and I have met only twice before -- and each time you have attempted to kill me. If your final shot had been an inch lower, I would be dead right now."
"It wasn't my final shot," Tallon lied.
"In that case you were very foolish to lose your gaudy little pistol. I suppose you heard me kick it down into the hold? If I had realized it was loaded I'd have been more careful in case it -- "
"All right, Cherkassky. You're laying it on too thick. It shows lack of taste."
He stepped quickly back into the corridor, wondering what he could use to defend himself. The only possibility was to find something to throw. He ran to the galley and feverishly opened cupboards and drawers with his free hand. There were no carving knives, and the table knives were of lightweight plastic. Seconds were racing by, and to make matters even worse, Seymour's eyes were almost closed, reducing Tallon's vision to a hazy grayness.
The only objects that looked promising were several large cans of fruit next to one of the supply magazines. He tried to lift them in one arm, but they rolled away, clattering on the floor. Tallon set Seymour on the floor, gathered up the cans, and ran blindly down the corridor toward the control room, expecting at any instant to feel a lead slug smash into his spine. He got into the control room, jumped to one side, and fumbled with the eyeset's controls until he picked up Cherkassky's eyes.
He got a sharp, steady view of the corridor, as seen from the other end, and he realized Cherkassky had stood on the catwalk and watched him run, without shooting. That meant the little man was determined to make a marathon out of it. Tallon hefted one of the heavy cans, edged across to the doorway, and hurled the can down the corridor with all his strength. Through Cherkassky's eyes he saw his hand appear and the can come barreling through the air. Cherkassky avoided it with ease and it bounced noisily into the hold, filling the ship with echoes.
Tallon groped on the floor and got another can. He decided to wait till Cherkassky was farther along the corridor, giving him less time to see -- and avoid -- the improvised missile thrown at him. With his back pressed against the wall, Tallon watched the slowly zooming view of the corridor and the expanding rectangle of the control-room door. At the entrance to the galley, the view rotated to take in the disordered cupboards and drawers; and there was Seymour inching across the floor, his pointed teeth bared in a ridiculous attempt at a snarl. Tallon guessed what was coming next.
"Go back, Seymour!" he shouted. "Lie down, boy."
Apart from shouting, there was nothing he could do. Closing his eyelids did nothing to blot out the pictures he was receiving. He had to stand and look along the pistol sights with Cherkassky's eyes. The pistol roared, and Seymour's body smashed against the far wall of the galley.
Tallon stepped out and threw the can, every muscle in his body snapping taut behind it. He heard a thud as it connected with something soft, and then he was winging down the corridor, propelled by a white-hot thrust of hatred. The metal walls spun violently as he slammed into Cherkassky. They half-skidded, half-rolled, right to the dark edge of the catwalk, then rebounded from the handrail and back down the full length of the corridor. Somewhere along the way the eyeset was pushed up on to his forehead, and Tallon was unable to see, but it made no difference to him. He was at grips with Cherkassky, and a loudly chanting voice in his head was telling him that nothing in the whole universe could stop his hands from doing their appointed work.
He was wrong.
&nb
sp; Using the Block-developed combat rhythms, he might have extinguished Cherkassky in a few seconds; but his fingers, obeying a more ancient discipline, crooked into the other man's throat. He felt Cherkassky's body transformed by the same steely strength it had displayed when they were falling from the hotel window long ago. Cherkassky's locked forearms triangled upward in the oldest counter in the book, splitting Tallon's hold, and Cherkassky twisted free. Tallon tried to prevent the separation, which would give Cherkassky the advantage, but blows from the heavy pistol numbed Tallon's arms. He was forced to take a valuable second to pull the eyeset down onto his nose, knowing as he did so that the fight was lost.
Cherkassky made use of this opportunity, and Tallon recovered vision just in time to see the gun barrel being jammed into his solar plexus. He fell backward into the control room, the wind knocked out of him. Once again he looked along the sights of Cherkassky's pistol, this time at himself. The point of aim wandered from his belly to his head and back down again.
"You've had a long run, Tallon," Cherkassky said quietly, "but in a way I'm glad. Shooting any other prisoner would ruin my reputation with our revered Moderator, but you've caused so much trouble that nobody is going to complain."
Tallon, gasping for breath, made a weak attempt to roll sideways as he saw Cherkassky's finger tighten on the trigger; then the underlying assumption behind the words reached his brain, a final message of unexpected hope.
"Wait . . . wait His lungs fought to supply the air necessary for speech.
"Goodbye, Tallon."
"Wait, Cherkassky . . . there's something you don't -- look at the screens!"
Cherkassky's eyes flicked momentarily to the unfamiliar star patterns on the black panels, back down to Tallon, then focused on the screens again.
"This is a trick," Cherkassky said in a voice that was not quite normal. "You didn't . . ."
"I did. We made an open-ended jump." Tallon struggled for breath. "So you were right when you said shooting me won't ruin your reputation. Nobody will ever know, Cherkassky."
"You're lying. The screens could be showing a recorded view.
"Look at the direct-vision panels then. How do you think we got into space through all that heavy stuff you called in?"
"They knew I was in the ship. They wouldn't fire with me in the ship."
"They fired," Tallon said flatly, "and we jumped."
"But they wouldn't ," Cherkassky whispered. "Not at me."
Tallon kicked his feet upward, doubling Cherkassky forward on top of him. This time he fought coldly and efficiently, impervious to fear or hatred, to the thunderous sound of the pistol, to the knowledge that his enemy's living eyes were his sole remaining gateway to light and beauty and stars.
Tallon closed that gateway forever.
twenty-one
You can feel like dying. You can even lie down on the floor and will yourself to die. But all that happens is you go right on living.
Tallon made the discovery slowly, over a period of hours, as he walked the silent ship. He visualized the Lyle Star as a bubble of brilliance suspended in an infinity of darkness, and himself as a fleck of darkness drifting in a sharply confined universe of light. Nothing could be more pointless than prolonging that arrangement for fifteen years; yet he was hungry, and there was food, so why not eat?
Tallon thought it over. A short-term goal. Once it was achieved, what then? Wrong type of thinking, he decided. If you are going to exist on short-term goals, you discard the logical processes associated with long-term goals. When you are hungry you cook something and you eat it. Then maybe you get tired, so you sleep; and when you wake up you are hungry again. . . .
He took off the eyeset, but found his plastic eyes felt uncomfortably naked without their protective covering, and put it back on. The first short-term goal of his new existence would be to set up a tidy house. He found Cherkassky's limp body, dragged it to the airlock, and propped it against the outer door. It took him several minutes to position the body in such a way that it would be sure to be carried clear of the lock when the residual air exhausted. A dead body made a poor traveling companion under normal circumstances, but an exposure to zero pressure would make it even less attractive.
When he was satisfied with the arrangement of the body he went to fetch Seymour, and laid the pathetic little husk in Cherkassky's lap.
Back in the control room he identified the relevant controls by touch, then blew the lock. Exit two more characters, he thought, leaving Sam Tallon alone on the stage. Doc Winfield had been the first; then Helen, with the red hair and whiskey-colored eyes. It occurred to him that she might not be dead, but there was no way he could find out, and he was straying into the wrong type of thinking again.
Tallon went to the galley, lifted one can from each supply magazine, and opened them. He identified their contents and memorized where each had come from in the row of dispensers. As a welcome change from fish, he decided on steak, and while it was cooking he found a refrigerated compartment with stacks of plastic tubular containers of beer. Thankful that Parane, where the Lyle Star had originated, had both adequate protein supplies and a sensible outlook on the use of alcohol, he settled down to his first meal in alien space. When he was finished he disposed of the plastic plates and utensils, then sat down and waited for nothing to happen.
Some time later he grew tired and went to find a bed. Sleep was a long time in coming because he was many thousands of light-years from the rest of his kind.
Tallon kept it up for four cycles of activity and sleep before concluding he was bound to go mad if he continued this way. He decided he had to have a long-term goal to give his life direction, even if the term were longer than his life span and the goal unattainable.
He went into the control room and explored the central computing bank with his fingertips, wishing he had paid more attention to it while eyes were still available to him. It took him some time to satisfy himself that it was a standard type, based on the cybernetic intelligence amplifier. Null-space travel demanded that a ship position itself within portals measuring no more than two light-seconds across. The standards of precision involved required that the computing facility and the astrogation complex be unified into a single automatic control system.
The control complex was fully programmed to account for variants, such as variable magnitude stars, in the perceived celestial sphere; but provision was also made to prevent positional fixes from being affected by rare and unpredictable phenomena like novas and supernovas. This took the form of data injection panels that provided pathways right into, among other things, the instruction store. The data injector had not changed since the first days of null-space travel. Tallon had heard that the relatively primitive system was retained solely because it enabled a reasonably competent engineer to convert a spaceship into an interstellar probe.
In other words, the design philosophy of the constructors was: This vessel is fully guaranteed and will always get you to your destination; but if it doesn't, you might as well try finding another world while you are out there.
Tallon had never investigated the matter personally, but he was banking on the stories being true, for there was no point in his making any further jumps without some means of checking on his position. The possibilities of his getting within reach of a habitable world in fifteen years of continuous null-space leaps were perhaps one in a billion. He was not deceiving himself about the chances of success, but there was nothing else open to him; and vegetating, which he had tried for four days, was unacceptable. Besides, in a truly random universe, he might make only one jump and find himself hanging above Earth itself, almost able to breathe its atmosphere, to smell the smoke of leaf fires drifting in the soft thick air of October evenings.
He went to work on the central control complex. Two more days of rest and activity went by before he was satisfied that he had successfully reprogrammed the system to meet his new requirements. Working blind, he taxed his brain to its full extent, reaching the same
degree of involvement that had enabled him to produce the eyesets.
Several times he found himself filled with a powerful sense of satisfaction. This, he thought, is what I'm good at. Why did I give up everything after college and take to star-jumping? Each time, unaccountably, he saw Helen's red hair and unusual eyes superimposed on his mental picture of the control complex. And finally he had altered the astrogation network from a beast that would jump only when it knew where it was, to one that would refuse to move if its multiple senses detected a planetary system within reach.
When Tallon had finished he felt sane. His mind felt sharp and clear. He went to bed and slept soundly.
After breakfast, which was what he called the first meal after a period of sleep, Tallon made his way into the control room and sat down in the center seat. He hesitated, preparing himself for the psychic wrench, and hit the button that projected the ship into that other incomprehensible universe. Click! A flash of unbearable brilliance seared into his eyes; then the jump was over.
