But once the robot was installed and the work of writing its program begun, Tallon found himself with nothing on his mind but the project. Winfield and he spent weeks in which every waking hour, apart from mealtimes and the compulsory prayer sessions, was spent in the prison library, listening to auto-readers. Most of the available journals were out of date, because their importation from Earth bad never been encouraged by the Lutheran government and, in recent years, had been practically banned by Earth. The latter move was a sign of the deterioration in relations between the two since the brand-new planet of Aitch Mühlenberg had dropped into Emm Luther’s lap; but the information was there just the same.
As he worked on it Tallon felt his mind sink through the layers the years had superimposed on his personality. A younger Sam Tallon emerged, one who had been determined to carve out a career in domain physics, until some unremembered event had diverted him into world-hopping, and then finally to the Block and all it represented. The contentment Tallon experienced was so profound, he began to suspect that a subconscious drive toward it had been his real motivation for initiating the artificial-eye project — not the desire to regain his own sight - or help Winfield, but a powerful need to re-create himself as he was … when? And why should a single encounter with Helen Juste have triggered the impulse? He had no memories of any girl with red hair and unusual eyes who might have been a proto-Helen.
As the computer program took shape they put the assembly robot to work on two identical prototypes of what, for lack of inspiration, they named eyesets. Supplementing the program, with its own vast store of instructions built into it for microminiature electronics, the robot slowly assembled two pairs of spectacles in the vacuum-locked privacy of its sterile belly. They were conventional in appearance, except for the beads that were the television cameras mounted on the bridge pieces. The rims served to direct the microwaves back into the eyes.
The only problem Tallon and Winfield had to handle themselves — through Ed Hogarth’s hands — was that of keeping the beams focused accurately on the optic nerve. They solved it by an adaption of Tallon’s original plan — a single metal plug at the edge of each plastic iris. The theory was that every eye movement would bring the metal plug to a new position in a weak magnetic field generated inside the spectacle frame, thus providing reference data for a single-crystal computer, which redirected the beams accordingly.
By the time he had reached the final part of the program, which dealt with the circuitry for the infinitely more subtle language of the glial cells, Tallon was wholly committed to the intellectual adventure. He scarcely touched his meals and was losing weight steadily.
The month-long reverie came to an end one afternoon as he lay in the sound-cone of an auto-reader.
He recognized Winfield’s approach by the quick, nervous tapping of the cane, which the old man still used in conjunction with the sonar torch.
“I’ve got to speak to you right away, son. Sorry to interrupt, but it’s important.” Winfield’s voice was hoarse with urgency.
“It’s all right, Doc. What’s the trouble?” Tallon swung his legs from the couch and rolled out of the sound area.
“The trouble is Cherkassky. The grapevine says he’s out of the hospital.”
“What of it? He can’t touch me in here.”
“That’s the point, son. They say he still isn’t fit for normal duty, but he has arranged to join the Pavilion staff for a ‘working convalescence.’ You know what that means, don’t you? You know why he’s coming here?”
Of their own accord, Tallon’s hands rose to his face, and the finger tips gently traced the curve of his unseeing, plastic eyes. “Yes, Doc,” he said quietly. “Thanks for telling me. I know why he’s coming here.”
seven
Light — fierce and steady.
Pain — fierce and steady!
Tallon snatched off the eyeset and sat contracted in the chair, waiting for the needling agony to subside. He knew his eyes would have been streaming with tears had the glands not been ripped away by the darts of Cherkassky’s hornet gun. The pain took a long time to recede, occasionally reaching its former level again, like a reluctant ebb tide.
“What’s the matter, Sam — no better?” Hogarth sounded cool and disinterested, which meant he was alarmed.
Tallon shook his head. “We’re not getting it. Something is seriously wrong with the conversion stage. The signals the nerve expects and the signals we’re feeding into it just aren’t compatible — and they hurt so much I can’t even look for tuning responses.”
“We took on a big job, son,” Winfield said sadly. “Perhaps too big, under the circumstances.”
“That’s not it. We were going well, right up to the last stage. The synthesis of the glial code was the only really tough part, but it was coming all right. I was drinking it, till I heard about our friend Cherkassky.”
“It was only a rumor. The grapevine has been wrong before.”
“Perhaps, but the effect’s the same whether the rumor’s true or false. I can’t hold the concept now. I just can’t say for certain if we’ve built in a basic error or merely have to chase out a few bugs. How about a local anaesthetic to kill the pain while I examine what we’re getting?”
“No good. You could crisp your optic nerves.”
“Then what in hell do we do? We’ve already wasted two weeks trying to synthesize something that every moronic beast that ever walked or flew or swam can do without even trying. It isn’t right that — Christ!” Tallon shouted with excitement as a new kind of light seared through his mind.
“Take it easy,” Winfield warned uneasily. “You know the penalities for blasphemy on this planet.”
“I wasn’t blaspheming. Doc, I know where we can pick up the whole visual-electrical complex. The lot — rod-and-cone, bipolars, ganglions, glials — the whole process absolutely ready-made. Ready for us to lift off the rack and put it on.”
“Where?”
“Right here in the workshop. Ed’s eyes are all right, aren’t they?”
Hogarth whinnied with alarm. “My eyes are fine, and I aim to keep them that way, you damned Earthside ghoul. Leave my eyes out of it.”
“We will, but your eyes won’t leave us alone. They’re bombarding us and everything around you with exactly the information the doctor and I need. Every kink in your optic nerves is spraying us with electrons. You’re a little radio station, Ed, and your tape jockey plays only one tune — the glial code.”
“My mother was right,” Hogarth said reflectively. “She always knew I would make good.”
“You sound excited, Sam.” Winfield’s voice was sober. “Do you think you’re getting it this time?”
“This time I’ve got it.”
Four days later, as dawn was beginning to overpaint the fainter stars, Tallon saw Winfield for the first time.
He sat perfectly still for a moment, savoring the miracle of vision, feeling humbled by the sudden stark revelation of the pinnacle of human technology upon which his triumph was poised: the centuries of research into the complex language of glial-cell transients; the development of assembly robots and micro-Waldos; the growth of cybernetic philosophies that enabled a man to incorporate a billion electronic circuits in a single chip of crystal and use only those that served his purpose, without his ever knowing which circuits they were.
“Tell us the worst, son.”
“It’s all right, Doc; it works. I can see you. The trouble is I can see myself as well.”
Tallon gave a sharp laugh and fought to adjust to the supremely unnatural situation of having a body in one place and eyes in another. For the first trial of the new eyeset, he and Winfield sat close together at one end of the workshop while Hogarth remained at the other end with strict instructions not to take his gaze off them. Tallon had not moved, but his new eyes told him he was at the other side of the room, looking at both Winfield and himself.