The official news was that Caldwell Dubois, for Earth, and the Temporal Moderator, for Emm Luther, had simultaneously recalled their diplomatic representatives following the breakdown of the Akkab negotiations over apportionment of new territories.
Unofficially, the two worlds were on the verge of war.
fifteen
Helen Juste: Twenty-eight years old, unmarried, beautiful, honors degree in social sciences at the Lutheran University, member of the planet’s premier family, holder of a governmental executive position — and a complete failure as a human being.
As she drove northward she tried to analyze the interactions of character and circumstance that had led to her present situation. There was her older brother, of course, but perhaps it was too easy to blame everything on Carl. He had always been there, looming big, a kind of landmark by which to steer through life; but over the years the landmark had crumbled.
The erosion began when their parents and Peter, their younger brother, were drowned in a speedboat accident near Easthead. Carl, in his last year at university, was driving the boat. He began to drink heavily after that, which would have been serious enough on any other world. On Emm Luther, where abstention was part of the very political and social structure, it was almost suicidal. He managed to hold together for three years, joining the space-probe design center as a mathematician; then a case of substandard bootleg brandy had cost him his eyesight.
She helped install him in his private estate, which would have cost a prohibitive amount had the Moderator not fixed it for Carl, partly out of family feeling and partly out of a desire to get him tucked safely away from the public eye. Since then, she had watched Carl grow more and more neurotic, break up into smaller and smaller pieces.
At first she had assumed she would be able to help; but looking within herself, she had found nothing to offer Carl. Nothing to offer anybody. Just a tremendous sense of inadequacy and loneliness. She tried to get Carl to emigrate temporarily with her to another world, perhaps even to Earth itself, where an operation to give him some form of artificial vision would have been legal. But he had been afraid to go against the Moderator’s wishes, to face the soul-attenuation of the flicker-transits, to leave the comfortable womb-darkness of his new home.
When Detainee Winfield had told her about Tallon’s idea for a seeing device it had seemed to be the answer to everything, although, looking back, she realized she had been wrong to suppose that making Carl happy in that particular way would have compensated for her personal inadequacies. She had broken every rule in the book to bring about the creation of the seeing devices, finally going too far for even the Moderator’s protection, only to see Carl use his new eyes to seek out other forms of darkness… .
After Winfield and Tallon had made their preposterous escape there had been a preliminary investigation by the prison board; as a result, she had been suspended from duty and confined to her quarters pending a full inquiry. An impulse had led her to slip away and head north to see Carl for perhaps the last time, and — with a strange inevitability — Tallon had been there too.
She glanced at Tallon, sitting beside her in the front seat, with the dog lying sleepily across his knees. He had changed since the first day she saw him walking so hesitantly with the box of the sonar torch strapped to his forehead. His face was much thinner, taut with strain and fatigue, but somehow more composed. She noticed that his hands, resting lightly on the dog’s tousled back, were at peace.
“Tell me,” she said, “do you really believe you’ll get back to Earth?”
“I don’t think that far ahead any more.”
“But you’re anxious to get back. What is Earth like?”
Tallon smiled faintly. “The kids ride red tricycles.”
Helen stared at the road. It was beginning to rain, and white road markers streamed under the car like tracer bullets aimed from the darkening horizon ahead.
Some time later she noticed that Tallon had begun to shiver. Within minutes his face was covered with perspiration.
“I told you to give yourself up,” she said casually. “You need attention.”
“How long will it take to reach New Wittenburg if we don’t stop?”
“Assuming you want me to keep within the speed limit — about ten or eleven hours.”
“That’s heading straight north? Along the strip?”
“Yes.”
Tallon shook his head. “Cherkassky is probably waiting for me along the strip, and he’s bound to have a description of this car. You’d better head east, up into the mountains.”
“But that will take a lot longer, and you haven’t even the strength to hold out till we reach New Wittenburg the short way.” Helen wondered vaguely why she was arguing over the welfare of the unimpressive Earthsider. Can this, she thought with a sense of shock, be the way it begins?
“Then it doesn’t matter which way we go,” Tallon said impatiently. “Head east.”
Helen took the first lateral road they came to. The car hummed effortlessly through several miles of neatly laid out, high-density residential developments, identical to all the others on the continent. Suburbia without the urbs. She wondered again what her life would have been like had she been born on another planet, into an ordinary family. Without the social isolation of rank, she might have married and had children … to someone — the thought came unbidden, yet with the force of a planet in its orbit — like Tallon. She sheered away from it. In another life she could have traveled; he had done that too, more than anybody she had ever met before.
She glanced across at Tallon again. “Is space flight very frightening?”
He started slightly, and she realized he had been drifting into sleep.
“Not really. They give you equanimol shots an hour before the first jump, and a whiff of something stronger before the ship hits the portal. The next thing you know, you’ve arrived.”
“But have you ever done it without tranquillizers and anaesthetic?”
“I’ve never done it with them,” Tallon said with unexpected force. “You know the one big flaw in the null-space drive, as we employ it? It’s the only form of travel ever devised that doesn’t broaden the mind. People shunt their bodies right across the galaxy, but mentally they’re still inside the orbit of Mars. If they were made to sweat it out without shots, to feel themselves being spread thinner and thinner, to know what flicker-transits really mean — then things might be different.”
“What sort of things?”
“Like you being a Lutherian and me being an Earther.”
“How strange,” she said aloud; “an idealistic spy.” But she made a silent acknowledgment to herself: This is the way it begins. Twenty-eight years it had taken her to discover that she could not become a complete human being by herself. The sad thing was that it had begun with someone like Tallon and would therefore have to be stopped right away. She saw that his eyes were closed again behind the heavy frames of the eyeset, and that Seymour had slipped into a contented doze — which meant Tallon was in darkness and drifting into sleep.
She began to draw up a plan. Tallon was weakened by strain, exhaustion, and the effects of his wound, but something about his long thoughtful face told her he would still be too much for her to handle alone. If she could further lull him and keep him awake till nightfall, it might then be possible to do something after he’d gone to sleep. She searched for a subject that would interest him, but could think of nothing. The car was moving into the green foothills of the continental spine when Tallon himself began to talk in an effort to fight off unconsciousness.