Tallon raised the automatic. “Sorry. Come in and close the door behind you.”
“You realize how serious this is?”
“I haven’t been laughing much.” Tallon stood back while she closed the door and went to her brother. He wished he could look at Helen Juste, but as she had the only functioning eyes in the house, he saw nothing except her neatly manicured hands moving over Carl Juste’s unconscious face. As before, in her presence he was aware of powerful stirrings deep within him. Her hand came away from the back of Juste’s head, with traces of blood in the lines of the palm.
“My brother needs medical attention.”
“I’ve told you he’s all right. He’ll sleep for a while. You can tape up that cut if you want.” Tallon spoke confidently, knowing he had given Juste’s nervous system enough abuse to keep him under for perhaps an hour.
“I want to do that,” she said; and Tallon noticed the complete absence of fear in her voice. “1 have a first-aid kit in my car.”
“In your car?”
“Yes. I’m not likely to drive off and leave my brother alone with you.”
“Get it then.” Tallon had an uneasy feeling he was losing the initiative. He walked to the door with her and waited while she went to her car and took the kit from a compartment. The car was a sleeL luxury job with gravity negator skids in place of wheels, which was why he had not heard it arrive. He watched her hands at work with the gauze pads and tape, and he almost envied Carl Juste for a moment. Tallon’s head ached, his shoulders were on fire, and he was way beyond ordinary tiredness. Lying down to sleep when you are tired, he thought, was a pleasure more exquisite than eating when you were hungry, or drinking when you were thirsty… .
“Why did you do this, Detainee Tallon? You must have realized my brother is blind.” She spoke almost abstractedly as she worked.
“Why did you do it? We could have made three eyesets, six, a dozen. Why did you allow the Doc and me to have them when you were planning to take them away from us?”
“I was prepared to stretch the law for the sake of my brilliant brother, not for the sake of convicted enemies of the government,” she said stiffly. “Besides, you still haven’t explained this senseless attack.”
“My eyeset got damaged, so I had to take this one.” Tallon felt a wave of irritation, and his voice rose. “As for the senseless attack, if you look around you’ll find a few bullet holes in the walls. And none of them were made by me.”
“Nevertheless, my brother is a harmless recluse, and you are a trained killer.”
“Listen, you,” Tallon shouted, wondering what the conversation was really all about, “I have a brain too, and I’m not a — ” He broke off as he discovered her eyes had left her brother and were giving him a steady picture of his own left hand.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” She sounded, at last, like a woman.
Tallon had forgotten the embedded claw. “Your harmless brother had a harmless feathered friend. That’s part of its undercarriage.”
“He promised me,” she whispered. “He promised me not to — ”
“Louder, please.”
There was a silence before she answered, speaking normally again. “It’s hideous. I’ll remove it for you.”
“I’d be grateful.” Suddenly weak, Tallon stood by while she covered her brother with a blanket. They went through a door at the rear of the hall and into a chrome and white kitchen that bore traces of untidy bachelor living. Helen Juste was carrying the first-aid kit. He sat at the cluttered table and allowed her to work on his hand. The touch of her fingers seemed only slightly more substantial than the recurrent warmth of her breath on the torn skin. He resisted the temptation to bask in the welcome feeling of being cared for. New Wittenburg was a long way to the north, and this woman was a new obstacle to his getting there.
“Tell me,” she said, “is Detainee Winfield really … ?”
“Dead,” Tallon supplied. “Yes. The rifles got him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For a convicted enemy of the Lutheran government. You surprise me.”
“Don’t try that approach with me, Detainee Tallon. I know what you did to Mr. Cherkassky when you were arrested.”
Tallon snorted. “Do you know what he did to me?”
“The injury to your eyes was an accident.”
“Damn my eyes. Did you know he put a brain-brush on me and tried to wipe my life away like you just did to the stains on this table?”
“Mr. Cherkassky is a senior Lutheran executive. He wouldn’t.”
“Forget it,” Tallon said brusquely. “That’s what I’ve done. Whatever it was — I’ve forgotten it.”
When she had finished with his hand and taped the wound he flexed the fingers experimentally. “Will I ever play again, Doctor?”
There was no reply, and he felt a creeping sense of unreality. Helen Juste eluded him; he was unable to imagine her as a human individual, to visualize her place in this world’s society. Physically he could see her only fleetingly when she happened to glance at her own reflection in the kitchen mirror. He noticed, too, that she kept glancing toward a shelf on which lay several small pieces of soft leather, stitched into the shape of bags. Their purpose mystified him; then he remembered Juste’s bird and that it had been trained for falconry.
“How ill is your brother, Miss Juste?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did he react to the eyeset? Did he like hunting with his birds? Running with the dogs?”
She went to the window and stared out at distant trees, limned against the red disk of the rising sun, before answering. “It isn’t your business.”
“I think it is,” he said. “I didn’t realize what was happening at the time. I knew Cherkassky was coming. There was no time to wait for the answer to the problem of the cameras, so I decided to look through the eyes of other men. It was that simple. I had no idea I was creating the first new form of perversion the empire has seen in a long, long time.”
“You mean, you … ?”
“No, not me. I’ve been running too hard. But there was that woman in Sweetwell — the one I’m supposed to have raped. She used the eyeset when I was sleeping. She liked cats, if you know what I mean.”
“What makes you think Carl was like that?”
“You do, though I don’t know why. Something about the way you keep insisting he’s a harmless recluse, perhaps. There may not be any sex angle in his case, of course. I’ve read that when a person who has been blind for a long time has his sight restored, it isn’t always the expected joyful experience. There can be depression, feelings of inadequacy caused by suddenly being back on even terms with the rest of humanity, with no handicap to fall back on. How much better to be, say, a falcon, with sharp eyes and sharper claws and a mind that doesn’t understand weakness, or anything but hunting and tearing and — ”
” Stop it!”
“I’m sorry.” Tallon was faintly surprised at himself, but he had wanted to reach her and felt he had succeeded to some extent. “Do you treat only those wounds your brother has inflicted? There’s this hole in my back… .”
Helen Juste helped him to work the uniform down from his shoulders, and gasped when she saw the great pool of congealed blood that lay across his back. Tallon almost gasped too as he received the picture. He had never before really appreciated the degree of nastiness that can be covered by the phrase “nasty flesh wound.” This was nasty, it was fleshy, and it was a wound in anybody’s book.
“Can you do anything with it — short of amputating my shoulders, that is?”
“I think so. There wouldn’t be enough tissue welder and bandages in my own first-aid kit, but Carl usually has some in this cupboard.” She opened it, found the medical supplies, and got to work on his shoulder with a moistened cloth, gently removing the superfluous mess. “This is a gunshot wound?”