“Where are you, Doc? Can you see me?”
“This way, son. That’s far enough. Hold out your left hand.”
Tallon did as he was told and felt something light and brittle drop into his fingers. It was the eyeset. He put it on and was jolted with green blurs of brilliant light. Winfield had dropped the birdcage, and Tallon found himself looking at an unearthly scene through the slime-streaked plastic. At first he did not recognize the mud-splattered starfish shape that was himself or the other writhing one that was Winfield.
The doctor was lying on his back, and his right leg was sunk up to the knee in a seething patch of turbulence. Red stains were spreading in the churning water, and around its perimeter eight jointed stalks whipped and quivered in the air. Moaning with dismay, Tallon oriented himself and lunged sideways for the spear, which had dropped clear of Winfield’s hand. He lifted it and drove the point down through the mud toward where he guessed the muck spider’s body to be. The surface of the water heaved sluggishly, and the spear twisted in his grasp.
“Hold on, Doc. I’m using the spear on it.”
“It won’t work that way. Skin too tough. Got — got to go down the throat. Give me the spear.”
Tallon hauled the spear back and guided it into Winfield’s blindly grasping hand. The doctor’s mouth gaped silently as he took the crude weapon and worked the point down into the water close to his leg. The green stalks clawed eagerly at his arms, then suddenly sprang upright.
“I’m getting there,” Winfield grunted. “I’m getting it.”
He grasped the spear higher up on its shaft and triumphantly began to go up it, hand over hand. The surface of the swamp all around him convulsed as his weight bore down on the vibrating spear. Tallon, crouched close by, was totally absorbed in the struggle when silent alarms began to sound in his head. Winfield was winning his battle, but there was another danger, something they were forgetting.
“Doc!” he shouted. ” You’re standing up!”
Winfield froze for an instant, looking guilty rather than afraid, and was dropping to the ground when the missile claimed him.
Tallon heard the incredible impact, the subway roar of the missile’s flight arriving in its wake, and he glimpsed the doctor’s headless body cartwheeling away over the water. Seconds later came the tardy, rolling echoes of the rifle shot. The spear still stood upright in the mud, rocking slightly with the movements of the unseen spider.
That was a stupid action, Tallon thought numbly; you weren’t supposed to stand up, Doc. You warned me not to stand up, and then you stood up. He crouched on his hands and knees for several seconds, shaking his head bewilderedly; then the anger returned, the same anger that had let him carry Cherkassky out through a hotel window into the thin air high above New Wittenburg.
Tallon wiped the slime off the plastic cover of the bird cage to give himself a better view of his own actions; then he crept to the spear. Ignoring the beating of the jointed green stalks, he pulled the spear up and drove it back down into the same spot again and again, until the water was whorled with cream-colored fluid. Pulling the spear up for the last time, he went in search of Winfield’s body. He found it in a shallow pool, already shrouded in a shimmering cloak of leeches.
“I’m sorry, Doc,” he said aloud, “but Earth expects you to do one more thing. And I know you would want to oblige.”
Tallon worked the tip of the spear into a fold in the plastic of the doctor’s suit, and groaning with the effort, levered the body into an upright position. He was much closer this time, and the impact of the second missile stunned his senses as the spear and its grisly burden were ripped from his fingers. Tallon collected the bird and the supply pack, then draped himself in the heavy screen of dringo leaves. He moved forward for another four hours before he risked making a tiny opening in the overlapping leaves and holding the bird cage close to it.
He had almost reached the northern edge of the swamp, and far ahead, with sunlight gleaming on its upper surfaces, the slim pylon of a rattler rifle soared up above the mists. Tallon had no way of knowing if he was looking at the rifle that had killed Logan Winfield, but somewhere along the line one of the sentient machines would be registering two missiles fired. To the Pavilion security force, two missiles fired would mean that two prisoners had terminated their sentences.
Beyond the slender pylon Tallon glimpsed the sloping gray uplands of the continent’s spinal ridge. He settled down, with the bird cage held tight in his arms, to wait for night and the start of the real journey.
There were still a thousand miles to New Wittenburg — and eighty thousand portals to Earth.
ten
Tallon passed through the line of pylons at dusk.
He guessed the declination of the rifles would be limited to the edge of the swamp and beyond, but he stayed beneath the screen anyway, and the crawling feeling between his shoulder blades remained there until he had safely crossed the line. His first action on the other side was to cut away the plastic envelope, wrap it inside the leaves, and hide the bundle in a clump of prickly shrub. Working quickly, he took Ariadne II out of her cage, tied her leg to the epaulette of his prison uniform, and climbed the palisade that kept the general public from straying into the rattlers’ domain.
The exhilaration of freedom, of walking like a human being on firm ground again, sustained Tallon as he moved diagonally over the rocky foothills marking the beginning of a mountain chain that straggled the whole length of the continent. When he had gained a little height he saw the trembling, varicolored lights of a small town clustered in the curve of a bay about five miles distant. The awesome planetary ocean stretched blackly away to the west, pricked here and there by the navigation lights of trawlers. He breathed deeply, savoring his release from the Pavilion, as well as the release from all pressures of human identity — a feeling one gets when nobody in the whole universe knows where he is or even if he exists.
At that moment the journey Tallon was about to attempt seemed absurdly easy. This, had he lived, would have been Winfield’s hour of triumph, Tallon knew. But the doctor was dead, and dead again.
Suddenly Tallon was tired and hungry and aware that he stank. There were no lights visible between him and the town — the ground appeared too rough for any sort of farming — so he headed down again to the water’s edge. On the way he searched in Winfield’s pack and found, in addition to the green guards’ uniforms, a flashlight, soap, and depilatory cream. There were also several bars of candy — more reminders of the old doctor’s years of patient work toward a day he was never going to see.
Standing on the pebbles of the narrow beach, Tallon stripped and washed in the cold sea. Keeping only his boots, he put on the fresh clothing and was relieved to find that one of the stretch-fabric uniforms fit him well enough. He tied the unprotesting bird to one shoulder, slung the pack over the other, and began walking north.
At first it seemed a good idea to stick to the beach in preference to the rock-strewn hillside, but as he walked it became obvious that there was no real beach. Mostly there was just a tiny strip of rough pebbles, and in many places tough grasses grew right to the water’s edge. After he’d been stumbling along the uneven stones for a while Tallon remembered he was not going to find any stretches of smooth sand. Emm Luther had no moon, which meant it had practically no tides, and therefore no beaches and no sand.
If only there were a moon, darling, we could have a moonlit picnic on the beach , he thought, if only there were a beach.