“Backward?” Tallon wasn’t sure if Ike was expressing an honest opinion or making a devious joke.
“That’s what I said.” Ike wasn’t kidding. “It happens on Earth, too. Take somebody like a surgeon. That man wants to be a surgeon — he wouldn’t do any other job in the world — and yet he gets paid ten or twenty times as much as some poor guy who is doing work he hates. It isn’t right that somebody like — what do you call the head man on Earth right now?”
“Caldwell Dubois,” Tallon supplied.
“Well, he likes being head man, so why should he get so much more money than somebody who has to mind a machine he hates the sight of? No, brother, there should be a kind of psychological checkup every year on everybody who’s working. When it shows that somebody is starting to like his job, his pay should be cut, and that would provide extra money for another guy who hates his work a bit more than he did the year before.”
“I’ll pass your thoughts on to Caldwell Dubois the next time I see him.”
“We’ve got a real celebrity here,” Denver said. “After he’s had sherry with the Justes he’s going on to dinner with the president of Earth.”
“Talking about your principles,” Tallon said to Ike, “would they allow you to give me back a little money for train fare?”
“Sorry, brother. Principles is principles, but money is money.”
“I thought so.”
Tallon walked on blindly, allowing himself to be shoved unceremoniously into gardens or doorways every time an automobile went by. The two men accepted without question his need to avoid being seen, and they got him to the Juste estate without incident. Tallon wondered if. in spite of what Ike had said, they really did know who he was. It would explain their willingness to help him in this way and also their readiness to take advantage of him.
“Here we are, brother,” Ike said. “This is the main gate. It will be daylight in less than an hour, so don’t try going in there in the dark. The dogs are unfriendly.”
“Thanks for the warning, Ike.”
Tallon released his grip on the bars of the massive steel gate and dropped to the ground. In the gray half-light he saw himself through the eyes of Seymour, who had already wriggled through the bars and waited patiently while Tallon went over the top. The eyeset, completely unused for a day and a half, was giving a faint picture at maximum gain. It had reached the stage at which its useful life could be measured in minutes.
“Come on, boy,” Tallon whispered urgently. Seymour leaped up into his arms, spinning Tallon’s universe around him, but he had become used to the occasional disorientation that was bound to occur when his eyes had four legs, a tail, and the mind of a terrier. Although he had never been interested in animals as pets, Tallon had developed a strong affection for Seymour.
With the dog tucked under his arm and the automatic pistol in his hand, Tallon walked cautiously up a gravel driveway that wound through tumbled banks of dense shrubbery. He lost sight of the gate immediately, and found himself moving thrugh a tunnel of overhanging trees and lush dark foliage. The drive wound back on itself twice before coming to a misty park. There were many trees here too, but Tallon was now able to see a low rambling house on top of a small hill, with a series of ascending terraces.
It was then he heard the dogs howling their deep-throated indignation at his presence in the grounds. The awful sound was followed by a fierce crackling of foliage as they came racing to hind him. To Tallon they sounded as big as horses, and although he had not seen them yet, they seemed to be moving at top speed.
He spun round once on his heels, equivalent to turning the head in a normally sighted person. There was nothing to be gained by running back into the bushes, and the house was at least four hundred yards away and uphill. Some of the trees growing on the terraces had trunks that separated into three or four thick curving branches just above the ground. Tallon ran to the nearest one and scrambled into the narrow cleft.
The dogs — three gray shapes — appeared off to his left, skimming along the edge of the shrubbery. They looked like a local hairless mutation of original wolfhound stock, with huge flat heads carried close to the ground. Their howling grew louder as they saw Tallon.
He began to raise the automatic, but Seymour’s body convulsed in Tallon’s arms at the sight of the large bounding dogs. Before Tallon could adjust his grip the little dog was down on the grass, yelping with fear and scuttling frantically back toward the entrance gates. Tallon shouted desperately as he saw, at one side of Seymour’s vision, one of the gray shapes separate from the others to intercept the terrier. Then Tallon had to think about his own situation, for without the use of Seymour’s eyes he was, literally, easy meat.
His fingers flicked the eyeset controls, reselecting on proximity, and he got behind the eyes of the nearest dog. It was a little like watching a film shot from the nose of a low-flying jet — a tremendous sense of arrowing flight, ground flowing rapidly underneath, stands of tall grass looming up, like hills, and being effortlessly penetrated as though they were green clouds. Up ahead, apparently rocking slightly because of the barreling motion, was a human figure, with a white desperate face, hanging onto the curving arms of a tree.
Tallon forced himself to raise the automatic and move his arm around until, from the viewpoint of the speeding animal, the weapon’s muzzle was a perfect black circle, with equal foreshortening of the barrel. The trick, he thought grimly, is to try to hit myself right between the eyes. He squeezed the trigger and was gratified to feel an unexpectedly powerful kick from the automatic. But, apart from one slight shudder, the shot made no difference to the rapidly expanding image he was receiving from the hound.
He tried again. This time the sound of the shot was followed by a deep bark of pain and surprise. He got images of crazily rotating sky and ground, then a close-up of grassy roots, which swiftly darkened into night. Mentally reeling from the shock of his own vicarious death, Tallon reselected for the next dog. He saw himself in the same tree, but much closer this time — and from the back.
Twisting awkwardly in the confined space of the tree trunks, Tallon fired instinctively and was rewarded by instantaneous blindness. That meant he had made a perfect kill. Wondering at the effectiveness of the little weapon, he ran his fingers over the machined metal and discovered that the muzzle, instead of being a simple circle, was a cluster of six tiny openings. Amanda Weisner apparently took no chances when she chose a weapon. The automatic was the kind that fired six ultra high-velocity slugs at a time, one from the center and five from slightly divergent barrels. At close range the small gold-plated automatic would obliterate a man; at longer distances it was a pocket-sized riot gun.
Not hearing any movement close by, Tallon pressed the number one stud — Seymour’s — and got only blackness. With a pang of grief, he tried the eyeset on “search and hold,” and picked up the third dog. It was moving through the heavy shrubbery quite slowly, and there was redness over the blurred area of snout obtruding in the lower edge of the picture.
Angry now, and with confidence in his armament, Tallon got out of the tree. Moving with noisy carelessness, he picked up his fallen pack and went up the hill in the direction of the house. As he had left the eyeset tuned in on the remaining dog, he was blind as far as his own movements were concerned, and he kept his arms outstretched in case he hit any trees. He could have fished the sonar torch out of the pack, but he was not expecting to get far before seeing himself through the third dog’s eyes. His guess was correct. The dog burst through the close-packed bushes, and Tallon got a dim picture of his own figure trudging toward the house. Once again the ground began to flow underneath in great flying bounds.