Night Walk (22 page)

Tallon began to get excited, without knowing why. The flash was associated
with the eyeset -- that much seemed certain. But what was causing it?
Was there some form of radiation in null-space that the eyeset was picking
up? Hardly, because the circuits were designed to screen out anything except
the incredibly subtle "phasing-of-phases" emanations from glial cells.
What else then? There were no people in the null-space continuum.
Tallon got up from the seat and began to pace the control room --
eight steps to the wall, turn, eight steps back.
He remembered the conversation with Helen Juste about her brother's work
for the Emm Luther probe-design center. Carl Juste had been working on
an idea that the null-space universe might be extremely small, perhaps
only a matter of yards in diameter. Could the reason no normal radio
equipment ever worked in null-space (thus preventing humans from mapping
its topography) be that they swamped themselves in their own signals,
the troughs in the wave profiles filling up as they traveled endlessly
around the tiny universe? If that were so, then the human eye -- which
transmitted its information not by amplitude, frequency, or even phase
modulation, but by phasing of phases -- could very well be the only
piece of "electronic" equipment capable of operating in null-space
without completely obliterating its own signal characteristics. And
the eyeset could be the first receiver to work in null-space. But the
question remained: What was causing the flash?
Tallon stopped short as the answer hit him: There were people in the
null-space universe! The time taken for the warp generators to set up
their field and collapse it again was less than two seconds on a minimum
increment jump, but the trade lanes of the empire were busy. Millions
of tons of freight and passengers passed through the zigzag routes
of galactic commerce every hour, so at any given instant there were
thousands of human beings in the null-space continuum. The blurring
effect, caused by the signal repetition in the claustrophobic universe,
could be enough to unite all their optic-nerve emanations into one vast,
unorchestrated output.
He felt his heart pound with excitement. The glial-cell emanations were
so weak as to be practically nonexistent. It was just possible they
could cross the null-space universe only a few times before dying out,
which meant there might well be directional information in the flash
they produced in the eyeset -- to say nothing of the possibility of a
form of null-space travel controlled by human will instead of by the
dictates of an alien geometry.
Tallon stood still for a moment. Then he started down the corridor
heading for the Lyle Star's maintenance workshop.
After a few minutes of fumbling among the tool racks, Tallon managed to
identify a heavy power saw with a conventional reciprocating blade. He
chose it in preference to a laser saw, on which it would be too easy for
a blind man to lose his fingers.
Carrying the saw on his shoulder, he went to the stern of the ship,
skirting the bales of compressed protein plant, and went to work on the
first layer of radiation screening. He cut three panels, each measuring
five feet by two feet, from the inch-thick material; then cut a smaller
one, two-feet square. The metal-seeded plastic was cumbersome, and he
fell several times while getting it up to the control deck.
With the screens in position, he made several attempts to use a multiwelder
on them, but his blindness was too much of a handicap. Putting the welder
aside, he made crude angle brackets by flattening and bending empty food
cans, and bolted them to the plastic panels. The work took a long time --
even a familiar hand drill became a tricky thing to use without sight --
but in the end he had constructed something like a sentry box. He changed
the bit in the drill and bored a single pinhole in the central wall of
the box.
Tallon's heart sank when be tried to move the box to where he wanted it
and felt its uncompromising weight. He levered it unsuccessfully for
a few minutes before remembering he was in a spaceship, an environment
in which weight was a contrived luxury. He found the master switch for
the artificial gravity system and turned it off, and the box was a lot
easier to handle. He positioned it in front of the captain's chair,
with the hollow side facing aft, and turned the gravity on again.
Hoping for success and fearing disappointment, Tallon clambered over the
central chair and worked himself forward into the box. The open side was
almost in contact with the footrest of the chair, and when he knelt on
the square of deck enclosed by the box's three walls he was effectively
screened from the direct-vision panels. He put his right hand around
the side of the box, drew the null-space drive console close to him,
and found the jump button. With his left hand he located the pinhole --
now the only channel by which optic-nerve signals could reach him --
and positioned his eyes directly behind it.
This time when he hit the jump button the flash was -- as he had hoped --
no more than a sudden brief glow of bearable intensity. Now it was time
for the crucial test. He made a series of jumps, being careful to keep
his head in the same relationship to the pinhole; then he got out of
the box, grinning with satisfaction. The flashes had varied in intensity.
Ignoring his insistent hunger pangs, Tallon de-activated the null-space
drive' unit and threw the warp generators over to manual control.
The Lyle Star was now set up to make extended visits to the null-space
universe without altering its position in either plane of existence.
Tallon detached a simple numerical computing module from the main
installation and spent some time familiarizing himself with its keyboard,
working to recover the old and almost forgotten skill by which his
fingers made the instrument an extension of his brain. When he was ready
he visualized himself as being at the center of a hollow sphere, and he
assigned basic coordinates to two thousand regularly spaced points on
the sphere's inner surface.
The next step of the project was to rotate the Lyle Star about its three
major axes, lining up the prow with every point in turn. At each position
he made the transit into null-space, estimated on a simple arbitrary scale
the brightness of the signal he was receiving, then came back and fed the
information into the computer.
He had to stop for sleep three times before it was finished, but in
the end he had in his hands -- pitifully incomplete though it was --
man's first map of the null-space universe.
Precisely, it was a low-definition computer model of the disposition of
the galactic trade lanes, as seen from one point in null-space. What he
needed now was a similar model of the normal-space universe as seen from
the same point. With that, he could turn both over to the big computer and
let it draw a comparison. There were nineteen worlds in the empire, and
as the initial and terminal portals for all but two of them were close to
Earth, the normal-space model would show a marked concentration in that
region. The null-space map would not show an identical concentration,
as there was not a one-to-one correspondence between the two continuums,
but Tallon hoped a computer would find some correlation between the
two. And if it did -- he was home, in more than one sense.
As a kind of hubristic celebration, he decided to treat himself to a fine
meal while thinking over the next step. He cooked an extra large steak
and began methodically reducing his stock of beer. When he had eaten
he sat quietly on a stool in the galley and assessed the situation.
He had done pretty well without eyes so far, but that was because he was
tackling familiar problems with instruments he could handle almost by
instinct. Building up a computer model of his own normal-space universe
would, paradoxically, be more difficult. He would not be able to "see"
the density of the interwoven space routes, and the alternative was to feed
in the galactic coordinates of every portal. This would be a big job --
the journey from Emm Luther to Earth, for example, would involve feeding
in three coordinates for every one of the eighty thousand portals.
It could be done, of course -- the data would be in storage somewhere --
but without eyes, the going would be . . . rough. The word "impossible"
had sprung into his mind and been thrust aside.
Tallon drank steadily, feeling his earlier elation subside. Because of his
blindness it looked as though he would have to explore the main computing
facility, taking it apart and assembling it again in the dark, merely to
get to know it. Then he would have to listen to everything in its random
access memory, until he obtained the data he needed. That could take
five or ten years. He could starve to death before he accomplished what
a sighted man, able to read the computer's language, could do in hours.
Tallon began to doze, but was awakened by a furtive, squeaking noise he
had not heard for many years. He froze for a moment before identifying
the sound. He was listening to a descendant of the first stowaway that
had ever slipped on board a ship back in the dawn ages when man was
pitting his first flimsy ships against the seas of Earth.
It was a rat.
twenty-two
Tallon had forgotten there were no lights shining in the cargo hold.
He found the lighting panel on the control deck and clicked on every tube
in the ship, but even with the eyeset at full gain he picked up nothing.
This, he concluded, was because there was too much screening between him
and the rat, or because the rat was hiding beyond the reach of light.
Either or both of these factors had prevented him from discovering the
animal before it came forward in search of food.
He went out of the control room and along the central corridor. Standing
at the handrail of the transverse catwalk he detected something, not so
much a glimmer of light as a slight lessening of darkness. It was a new
type of problem. He had not only to adjust to having his eyes separated
from his body, but also to deduce exactly where his eyes were, from very
slender clues.
The rat was probably somewhere in the bales of protein plant, but remembering
how quickly it had vanished when he'd grabbed for it in the galley, Tallon
felt there was no point in shifting the cargo. He decided to set a nonlethal
trap.
There was the old trick of upending a box, tilting it with a short stick
propped under one side, and jerking the support away when the quarry
was underneath. He changed his mind about it when he recalled a boyhood
experiment that had resulted in an unexpectedly speedy mouse being
flattened by an edge of the box. In the present circumstances, the rat,
which had probably crept aboard at Parane, was more valuable than a
champion racehorse.
Tallon took some bread from the galley, put it down near the bales of
cargo, and lay down close by. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.
As the minutes dragged by he found himself dozing off. He fought it
determinedly for a while; then he began to notice a gradual increase in
brightness. There was a shifting of dim planes, areas of patchy grayness
emerged from the darkness, followed by an irregular area of brightness
like the mouth of a cave. A huge shape stirred near by, frighteningly;
red eyes gleamed, speculatively and coldly. Tallon kept his breathing
steady. He knew that his rat had merely passed close to another rat on
its way out of their lair.
Quite suddenly he could see bright metal floor plates from close up,
stretching away toward dark horizons like a lifeless desert. There was
an alien sky above, a suggestion of cavernous vastness. The interior of
the hold, as viewed by a rat, was an alien and unfriendly universe in
which the natural instinct was to run for the safety of dark corners,
for the solace of red-eyed mates in the black caves.
Tallon wondered, uneasily, if the eyeset might be a more effective
receiver than he had imagined. What if there were a link-up between
the signals fed to the visual cortex and the other mental processes of
the animal or person concerned, a kind of emotional overlap? Perhaps if
he tuned in on a bull that was looking at a waving cloth he would pick
up undertones of anger. Perhaps using Cherkassky's eyes had made him a
ruthless killer, an instrument that turned the little man's own feral
instincts back on himself in a new manifestation of poetic justice. In
that case, had Helen's eyes brought him love?
Absorbed with this idea, Tallon barely noticed the little mound of bread
come into view as the rat neared it. The mound got nearer, became a
tumbled mountainside of food; then his own gigantic, bearded, dreaming
face loomed on the threatening horizon. The scene froze for a long time,
and Tallon forced himself to remain motionless. Finally the rat began
to advance again. Tallon waited until the glistening cellular structure
of the bread was very close before springing forward. Seen through the
rat's eyes, his attempt to snatch it was almost laughable.
At the first movement of the slumbering giant's tree-trunk fingers
everything blurred, and he was back in the half-world of dimly seen
shapes. He tried three more times, with the same result, before admitting
to himself that he would have to find a better way. What happens, he
thought, if I can't catch it? The tableau becomes even more ridiculous.
In the metal bubble of light and air a man with plastic eyes crawls in
endless pursuit of a rodent, never catching it because the only time he
can see it is when it sees him. . . .
"If a good swordsman challenges you to a duel," Tallon said aloud,
"you insist on fighting with pistols."
The sound of his voice in the lonely stillness of the ship reminded him
that he was, after all, a human being, a member of the species whose
special weapon was thought, something it was disturbingly easy to forget
while his eyes crept in darkness under the cargo.
He picked up the bread and carried it forward, setting it on the plates
at the end of the control-deck corridor. He stopped for a moment in
the galley, then went on into the control room and sat down. This time
Tallon waited until the rat was nose-deep in the mountain of food before
he made his move.