Detainee Samuel Tallon, he learned, was still alive and had reached the city of Sweetwell. Tallon, who had been convicted of spying for imperialist Earth, had forced his way into a Sweetwell restaurant, had assaulted and raped the proprietress, and had then vanished with most of her cash. It was now confirmed that, although blind, the escaped detainee was equipped with a radarlike device that enabled him to see. He was described as being armed and dangerous.
Tallon smiled wryly. The bit about rape was particularly good, coming from Amanda. He fell asleep and managed to doze most of the day, only coming fully awake when low growls from Seymour announced that people were moving around outside. Nobody came into the shed, and after a while Tallon stopped thinking about what he would do if they did. Winfield’s philosophy that a man had to do his best with the present and leave the future to itself was not especially attractive to Tallon, but it was the only one that worked in the present circumstances.
At dusk he gathered up Seymour and the pack and cautiously opened the door. As he was about to step out a large plum-colored limousine swept up the short driveway and rolled to a halt outside the main house. A thickly built young man got out, with his jacket slung over his arm, and waved to someone in the house who was beyond Tallon’s field of vision. The young man walked toward the front entrance, stopped at a bed of pale blue song-flowers, and knelt down to remove a weed. At his touch the flowers began a sweet, sad humming that was clearly audible in the dark confines of the shed.
The song-flowers were a native variety that fed on insects, using the plaintive humming sound to attract or lull their prey. Tallon had never liked them. He listened impassively for a moment, holding Seymour’s eye to the narrow opening of the door. The heavy-set man discovered several more weeds and uprooted them; then, muttering furiously, he came toward the shed. Tallon slipped the automatic out of his pocket, reversed it in his hand, and stood waiting as the crunching footsteps reached the other side of the door.
This was exactly the sort of thing he had hoped to avoid. His training was such that he could beat most any man in physical combat; but having his eyes tucked under one arm was going to make a big difference.
He tensed himself as the door latch moved.
“Gilbert,” a woman’s voice called from the house. “Change your clothes if you’re going to start gardening. You promised.”
The man hesitated for two or three seconds before turning and moving away toward the house. As soon as the man was inside the house Tallon slipped out of the shed and hit the road again.
He kept it up for four days, traveling a short distance by night and hiding out during daylight, but the deterioration in the eyeset’s performance was becoming more noticeable. By the end of the fourth night, the picture he was getting was so faint that he would almost have been better off with the sonar torch. His name had gradually faded from the newscasts, and so far he had not seen a single member of the E.L.S.P. or even of the civil police. He decided to begin traveling in daylight again.
Tallon walked for three more days, not daring to try hitching a ride. He now had plenty of money, but the risk of eating in restaurants or even at lunch counters seemed too great, so he lived on the bread and the protein preserves he’d taken from The Persian Cat, and by drinking water from the ornamental fountains along the way.
Seeing it from the point of view of a pedestrian, Tallon was aware, as never before, of Emm Luther’s desperate need for land. The density of population was not particularly high, but it was completely uniform — the residential developments, interspersed with commercial and industrial centers went on without end, filling every square mile of level land the continent had to offer. Only where uplands merged into actual, hostile mountainsides did the waves of neat, prefabricated buildings fall back in defeat. Some attempt was made at agriculture in the high borderland areas, but the planet’s real farming space was the ocean.
Tallon had covered almost one hundred miles before realizing that he was going to be able to see only poorly for perhaps two more days and would then be blind again — with 700 miles still to go.
The only faint ray of hope was that the Block would know he was out of the Pavilion. All members of the network would be on the lookout for him, but the organization had never been strong on Emm Luther. New Wittenburg was the planet’s only entrance point, and the E.L.S.P. automatically put tracers on every Earthsider who took up residence. It was quite possible that at that very moment good agents were being caught as they broke their covers in order to try to intercept Tallon. He decided to keep on the road for one more day and head for the railway again.
The next day passed without incident. Tallon was aware that none of the newscasts had given an adequate description of the eyeset, although Amanda must have been able to furnish one. He figured there was some kind of censorship at work, perhaps to avoid an official scandal over the fact that dangerous political prisoners had been given facilities to manufacture highly sophisticated artificial eyes. He sensed that Helen Juste might be in trouble; but the main thing, as far as Tallon was concerned, was that the general public had no idea what they were looking for. Anybody interested enough to look for someone using a “radarlike device” might reasonably expect to see a man with a black box and rotating antenna on his head. As it was, spectacles were a fairly common sight, never having been fully supplanted by contact lenses; and Tallon in his dusty, anonymous uniform blended into most backgrounds. His unremarkable appearance had been one of his major assets in the service of the Block.
The following day was slightly colder, and there was a little rain, the first Tallon had seen since his arrest. His route had never taken him far from the coastal railway system, and now he began walking toward the ocean again. The dullness of the day was magnified by the somber images produced in the failing eyeset, and TalIon hurried to make the most of the measured amount of light left to him. Late in the afternoon he caught a glimpse of the ocean, and shortly afterward saw the glint of railway tracks.
Slanting north again to where he guessed the next railway station to be, Tallon found himself approaching the first really big industrial development he had seen on his journey. Behind a high perimeter fence the sawtooth roofs of the factory receded into the gathering dusk for almost a mile before terminating in the banked glowing windows of a design and administration block. The roar of powerful air-conditioning machinery reached Tallon as he walked by the fence, puzzled at the contrast between this huge plant and the typical family business setup prevailing on Emm Luther. Several dark green trucks passed, slowing down to go through a lighted and patrolled entrance a hundred yards ahead, and Tallon glimpsed the book-and-star emblems that marked them as the property of the government.
Tallon now began to understand. The immense, noisy complex was one of the factors that had put him in his present situation. It was part of the chain of government factories that was draining the planet of its technological cream in a massive production program for interstellar probes.
Here were built parts for the fantastically expensive robot ships that were launched from Emm Luther at the rate of one every fifty-five seconds, year in, year out. More than half a million probes a year — as many as were produced by Earth itself — were triggered into open-ended jumps and the consequent lonely destinies of flicker-transits. The planet had bled itself white in the effort, but the gamble had paid off with a new world.
Now the factories were swinging over to the crash production of everything needed to make Aitch Muhlenberg a going concern before Earth found a foothold. The land area of the new world was still secret, but if Emm Luther could put in two settlers, with support material, for every square mile before any other power found its way there, then by interstellar law the whole planet would be hers. Ironically, the law had been promulgated mainly by Earth, but that had been in earlier days, when the mother world had not foreseen the emancipation of her children.