Night Walk

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.

Tallon ripped off the eyeset and lay back in the big chair with his hands pressed over his eyes, his mind racing. He had forgotten the flash that had burned into his optic nerves when he’d jumped the Lyle Star out of New Wittenburg. There was nothing in any book that dealt with light flashes occurring in null-space; in fact most people experienced a momentary blindness during the transition. He listened to the computer and it was quiet, which meant he had not materialized within range of any planet in any part of the big, cold galaxy.

Mentally shrugging, he prepared to make another jump. This time he lowered the eyeset’s sensitivity to almost zero, and when the flash came it was greatly reduced in intensity. He took the eyeset off and made another jump that produced no light at all. With the eyeset back on, he made a fourth jump, and the flash was there again.

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.