“I will board your ship,” Tallon said, taking a step back, “in an hour from now. Since when did chauffeurs start giving orders?”
“This is a new category of treachery, Tallon. You’ll not survive it.”
“What do you intend doing about it, Captain?”
Tweedie shifted his feet and leaned his bulk forward slightly, like a wrestler preparing to bomb a smaller opponent. “Let’s put it like this,” he said stiffly. “The Block is interested in getting your head back to Earth. Whether it’s still attached to your body, or not attached to your body, is a minor detail.”
“You’ll have a job catching me,” Tallon said, backing away, “unless you want to call a policeman. There are plenty of them about at the moment.”
Tweedie crooked his massive fingers, the joints making audible cracks, then glanced around him helplessly. A pair of E.L.S.P. men were drifting past on the slideway only a few paces from him, and his ship was a good four hundred yards away across the crowded apron.
“Sorry, Captain.” Tallon walked confidenfly toward the moving belt. “You’ll have to be patient a little longer. You can have your most comfortable G-cell ready for me when I get back.”
“I warn you, Tallon.” Tweedie’s voice was thick with anger and frustration. “If you get on that slideway, you’ll make the trip back to Earth in a hatbox.”
Tallon shrugged elaborately and kept walking. Ten minutes later he was back on the roadway outside the airport entrance. Getting out had been even easier than getting in. He stuffed his papers into an inside pocket, then shifted the uncomplaining Seymour to a more comfortable position on his chest while he decided the best way to reach Helen’s hotel. Off to his right a commotion broke out at one of the entrances, and he automatically turned in the opposite direction.
It would take some time to reach Helen, and he would have to be more careful than ever. Tweedie had not been joking. Sam Tallon had crossed up the Block — something a man did only once — and now two groups of agents would be fanning out through the city, looking for him. Knowing the Block as he did, Tallon was uncomfortably aware that his chance for survival would probably be better if the E.L.S.P. got to him first.
Hunching his shoulders to light a cigarette, Tallon walked into the city.
seventeen
Tallon was surprised to discover he had one advantage over his adversaries. The discovery came when he glimpsed his own reflection in a store window and failed, for a moment, to recognize himself. What he saw was a tallish, fair-haired stranger walking with a round-shouldered professorial gait. His face seemed broader, composed of flatter planes, and Tallon knew himself only by the dog tucked under his arm.
That, he decided, would also be a useful identification for Earth agents as well. He thought about it for a moment, then had an idea. The chance was worth taking.
“Down you go, Seymour,” Tallon whispered. “You’ve been a passenger far too long.”
He set the dog at his feet and commanded him to heel. Seymour yelped and sped round Tallon’s ankles several times in frantic, skidding turns. Steadying himself in a suddenly whirling universe, Tallon gave the order to heel again and was relieved when the dog, apparently having expressed his feelings to his own satisfaction, obediently fell in behind him.
He began to walk again, guided by Seymour’s affectionate view of his rising and falling heels, but it proved too difficult, and he adjusted the eyeset controls until he received vision from someone behind him. Helen was staying at the Conan on South 53rd Street, a hotel she had frequented on previous visits to the city. It was some four miles from the spaceport.
Periodically cursing his lack of taxi fare, he plodded on through the unseasonable heat, feeling the built-up shoes beginning to blister his heels. He saw patrol cars nosing through the traffic several times, but they were obviously on routine circuits of the city. Once again Tallon found himself thinking vaguely that it was all too easy, that his luck was too good to be true.
The Conan turned out to be, by Emm Luther standards, a first-class hotel. Tallon halted in a doorway on the opposite side of the street and considered a new problem. Helen Juste was probably a minor celebrity — as a relative of the Temporal Moderator, a member of the prison board, and a woman of some wealth — and therefore an easy mark for the police, especially while staying at a hotel in which she was known. Walking up to the desk and asking for her could be the last mistake he would get the chance to make.
He decided to wait where he was and watch for her either leaving or entering the hotel. Half an hour went by and it seemed an eternity; Tallon began to feel he should move on. Then he had another thought: How did he know Helen was in there at all? She could have been taken away already, or unable to get a room, or she could have changed her mind. He dithered for another ten minutes, until Seymour began to get restless and started tugging on his trouser leg. Tallon got an idea; the dog seemed to be intelligent, so why not … ?
“Listen, boy,” Tallon whispered, hunkering down beside Seymour. “Find Helen. In there. Find Helen.” He pointed to the hotel entrance, where several groups were standing and talking.
Through the eyes of a passerby Tallon saw Seymour scramble across the street and disappear, with wagging tail, into the lobby. He reselected Seymour’s vision signals and immediately was weaving an uncertain course through the lobby, only a few inches above the carpet. There were more close-ups of stairs, skirting boards, and door jambs. Tallon, fascinated by the dog’s progress, could almost hear him sniffing as he tried for Helen’s scent. Finally he was looking at the base of a white door, saw forefeet paw at it, and then Helen’s face appeared, curious, surprised, laughing.
When she carried Seymour out to the street Tallon glimpsed his own gray-clad figure waiting in the doorway across the street. He waved, and she crossed the street and came over to him.
“Sam! What’s happened to you? You look — ”
“There’s no time, Helen. Do you still want to try flicker-transits?”
“You know I do. What do I need to pack?”
“There’s no time for packing either.” Having got this far, Tallon suddenly felt sick with anxiety, with the feeling that his luck couldn’t hold out. “If you’ve got cab fare we’ll leave right now.”
“All right, Sam. I’ve got the cab fare.”
With Seymour under his arm, Tallon took Helen’s hand, and they started walking and looking for a cruising taxi. He explained most of the situation to her as they walked. A few minutes later they caught a vacant robo-cab. Tallon fell back in the seat while Helen punched out their destination and fed a bill into the waiting rollers. His nerves were twanging a thin fierce tune, like high-tension cables in a gale. He wanted to scream. Even touching Helen and looking at her made no difference; the whole universe was falling in on him, and he would have to run very, very fast.
In the last block before the space terminal, Tallon reached out and pressed the button that stopped the cab. They got out and walked the rest of the way, Tallon’s instincts making him feel safer on the ground.
“When we get to the entrance,” he said, “we’ll have to separate for a few minutes. I’m supposed to be a Paranian crewman, so I go in by the staff entrance on the right. You get a sightseer’s ticket and go in at one of the other doors. We’ll meet at this end of the main north-bound slideway.”
“Will it be all right, Sam? Surely nobody can simply walk onto a ship, without formalities, and fly away.”
“Don’t worry. Terminals like this are too big for centralized customs and emigration checks. There’s a field neutralizer in every docking cradle that prevents the ship in it from lifting off until the customs and migration teams have worked it over.”