At the entrance to the mess hall a certain amount of jostling was going on where the groups converged, and the host caught up with him. Tallon found himself staring at the back of his own head from a distance of a few inches. Although disconcerting, the very proximity made it easier for Tallon to steer himself through the inner door and to an empty seat at one of the long tables. His host went farther up the hall and sat down, facing in a direction that excluded Tallon from the man’s field of vision. Fingering the eyeset frame, Tallon cleared the memory unit, switched to the minimum range of six feet, and let the “search and hold” start over again. There was a momentary haze of light as the eyeset picked up several signals at once before singling out one of them. Again he was lucky: This time he was looking through the eyes of the man at the opposite side of the table.
By the time the turret-shaped serving robot moved along the table’s central slot to dispense breakfasts, Tallon’s stomach was knotted with tension. He ate the full meal, however; he felt he had earned it.
Tallon and Winfield, both wearing eyesets, stood at attention as Helen Juste walked into the workshop. Hogarth, being crippled, was not obliged to do anything more than look respectful, but he raised himself as high as his crutches would allow.
Helen Juste smiled at Hogarth and motioned to him to sit down. Tallon, who was tuned in on Hogarth, also received the smile, and he responded instinctively before remembering it had not been directed at him. He saw what Hogarth meant when he’d described her as a spindly redhead with orange eyes, and at the same time he marveled at how any man could have dismissed the phenomenon of Helen Juste with such a phrase. She was slim, not spindly, and everything was in proportion, giving her sleekly economical lines that would have thrilled a star-class designer of humanoid robots. Her hair was a rich coppery brown, and her eyes were the color — Tallon sought an exact comparison — of aged whiskey in fire-lit crystal. He found himself whispering one word over and over again — yes, yes, yes… .
She stayed for almost an hour, showing intense interest in the eyesets, questioning Winfield closely about their operation and performance. The doctor protested several times that his was not the brain behind the eyesets, but although she glanced at Tallon on those occasions, she did not speak to him. Tallon found himself rather pleased at this, satisfied at having been placed in a special category.
As she was leaving she asked Winfield if they were finished with the assembly robot.
“I’m not sure,” Winfield said. “I expect the maintenance shop staff want it back in a hurry, but we’ve done almost no field work with the eyesets. There might be minor modifications needed; in fact, Detainee Tallon is not really satisfied with the basic concept. I think he wants to try again with a camera-based system.”
Helen Juste looked doubtful. “Well, as you know, I’ve been trying to introduce to the prison board the idea that they might have special responsibilities to those detainees who have suffered disablement. But there’s a limit to how much I can do in this direction.” She hesitated. “I’m going on leave in three days; the equipment must be returned by then.”
Winfield gave a military-style salute. “We sincerely thank you, Miss Juste.”
She went out, and Tallon thought her eyes flickered once, speculatively, in his direction, but Hogarth’s gaze was already turning away so Tallon could not be sure. He was depressed by her reminder that there was a world outside the Pavilion, and that she still belonged to it.
“I thought she was going to stay all day,” Hogarth complained bitterly, lighting his pipe. “I can’t stand that skinny dame coming into my shop.”
Tallon snorted. “You still have your eyes, Ed, but you don’t know how to use them.”
“Well spoken, son,” Winfield boomed. “Did you notice he hardly looked at her legs once? The first time in eight years I get a chance to look at a woman, and the old goat in charge of the eyes keeps staring out the window!”
Tallon smiled, but he noticed he was seeing nothing but a close-up of Hogarth’s pipe, with one gnarled finger pressing the gray ash down into the blackened bowl. He got an impression the little man was worried. “What is it, Ed?”
“Did either of you lady-killers go to the recreation block today to hear the newscast?”
“No.”
“Well, you should’ve. The negotiations between Emm Luther and Earth over the new planet have broken down. The Earthside delegates finally realized the Moderator is prepared to stall forever, and they walked out of the conference. It looks like we’ll soon be in the middle of the first interstellar war the empire has ever seen.”
Tallon put one hand on his temple; he had been forcing himself to forget all about the Block and the bead-sized capsule that nourished a fragment of his own brain. The thought that the little sphere of gray tissue could be equated with the green-blue immensity of a fertile world was insupportable. “That’s bad,” he said quietly.
“There’s more. The grapevine has it definite about Cherkassky. He’s coming here next week.”
Tallon continued to speak calmly in spite of the sudden hammering in his chest. “Doc, we haven’t really tested our new eyes yet. I think we ought to try a long walk.”
“You mean a really long walk?”
Tallon nodded soberly. It was a thousand miles to New Wittenburg and eighty thousand portals back to Earth.
eight
Cronin, the bird man, looked up at them with growing suspicion in his red-rimmed eyes. “No,” he said. “I’ve no owls, or hawks, or any birds like that. I tell you, we don’t have enough small vermin this far south to attract them. Why do you have to have a hunting bird?”
“We don’t,” Tallon replied quickly. “We’ll take two of those brown ones that look like doves. Just so long as they’re tame enough to stay with us and not fly off.”
He had wanted predatory birds because their eye positions corresponded roughly to a human’s, which meant it would be easier to get used to their form of vision. It would be good to have a vision center close to his own body, but Tallon was not happy about the idea of apparently seeing out of each side of his head. The main thing, however, was to get hold of some usable optical system in a hurry.
“Well, I don’t know about all this.” The bird man looked sharply at Tallon. “Say, aren’t you Tallon? I thought you were blind or something.”
“I am — almost. That’s why I want the birds. They’d be a bit like guide dogs.”
“Mmmm, I don’t know. You guys don’t look like bird-lovers to me. Birds are sensitive, you know.”
Winfield coughed impatiently. “We’ll give you four cartons of cigarettes for each. I understand that’s twice the standard rate.”
Detainee Cronin shrugged and lifted two of the dovelike native birds from the little wire-mesh aviary he had built on the southern end of the peninsula. He tied short lengths of cord to the legs of the docile, quivering birds and handed them over.
“If you want them to sit on your shoulders, tie them to your epaulettes for a couple of days till they get used to you.”
Tallon thanked him, and they hurried away with the birds. Near the crumbling walls of the original Pavilion gardens they stopped and transferred the birds to their shoulders. When Tallon selected his bird’s visual signals on a proximity basis, he felt as though the top had been lifted from his head, letting the light pour in. The bird’s widely spaced eyes provided Tallon with a brilliant 360-degree view of land, sea, and sky. This vision, which enabled the bird to spot hunters and other enemies, gave Tallon a feeling of being hunted. It was difficult to get used to having his own ear looming up on one side of his field of vision, but there was the consolation that nobody could take him by surprise.