Tallon stepped out and threw the can, every muscle in his body snapping taut behind it. He heard a thud as it connected with something soft, and then he was winging down the corridor, propelled by a white-hot thrust of hatred. The metal walls spun violently as he slammed into Cherkassky. They half-skidded, half-rolled, right to the dark edge of the catwalk, then rebounded from the handrail and back down the full length of the corridor. Somewhere along the way the eyeset was pushed up on to his forehead, and Tallon was unable to see, but it made no difference to him. He was at grips with Cherkassky, and a loudly chanting voice in his head was telling him that nothing in the whole universe could stop his hands from doing their appointed work.
He was wrong.
Using the Block-developed combat rhythms, he might have extinguished Cherkassky in a few seconds; but his fingers, obeying a more ancient discipline, crooked into the other man’s throat. He felt Cherkassky’s body transformed by the same steely strength it had displayed when they were falling from the hotel window long ago. Cherkassky’s locked forearms triangled upward in the oldest counter in the book, splitting Tallon’s hold, and Cherkassky twisted free. Tallon tried to prevent the separation, which would give Cherkassky the advantage, but blows from the heavy pistol numbed Tallon’s arms. He was forced to take a valuable second to pull the eyeset down onto his nose, knowing as he did so that the fight was lost.
Cherkassky made use of this opportunity, and Tallon recovered vision just in time to see the gun barrel being jammed into his solar plexus. He fell backward into the control room, the wind knocked out of him. Once again he looked along the sights of Cherkassky’s pistol, this time at himself. The point of aim wandered from his belly to his head and back down again.
“You’ve had a long run, Tallon,” Cherkassky said quietly, “but in a way I’m glad. Shooting any other prisoner would ruin my reputation with our revered Moderator, but you’ve caused so much trouble that nobody is going to complain.”
Tallon, gasping for breath, made a weak attempt to roll sideways as he saw Cherkassky’s finger tighten on the trigger; then the underlying assumption behind the words reached his brain, a final message of unexpected hope.
“Wait … wait His lungs fought to supply the air necessary for speech.
“Goodbye, Tallon.”
“Wait, Cherkassky … there’s something you don’t — look at the screens!”
Cherkassky’s eyes flicked momentarily to the unfamiliar star patterns on the black panels, back down to Tallon, then focused on the screens again.
“This is a trick,” Cherkassky said in a voice that was not quite normal. “You didn’t …”
“I did. We made an open-ended jump.” Tallon struggled for breath. “So you were right when you said shooting me won’t ruin your reputation. Nobody will ever know, Cherkassky.”
“You’re lying. The screens could be showing a recorded view.
“Look at the direct-vision panels then. How do you think we got into space through all that heavy stuff you called in?”
“They knew I was in the ship. They wouldn’t fire with me in the ship.”
“They fired,” Tallon said flatly, “and we jumped.”
“But they wouldn’t,” Cherkassky whispered. “Not at me.”
Tallon kicked his feet upward, doubling Cherkassky forward on top of him. This time he fought coldly and efficiently, impervious to fear or hatred, to the thunderous sound of the pistol, to the knowledge that his enemy’s living eyes were his sole remaining gateway to light and beauty and stars.
Tallon closed that gateway forever.
twenty-one
You can feel like dying. You can even lie down on the floor and will yourself to die. But all that happens is you go right on living.
Tallon made the discovery slowly, over a period of hours, as he walked the silent ship. He visualized the Lyle Star as a bubble of brilliance suspended in an infinity of darkness, and himself as a fleck of darkness drifting in a sharply confined universe of light. Nothing could be more pointless than prolonging that arrangement for fifteen years; yet he was hungry, and there was food, so why not eat?
Tallon thought it over. A short-term goal. Once it was achieved, what then? Wrong type of thinking, he decided. If you are going to exist on short-term goals, you discard the logical processes associated with long-term goals. When you are hungry you cook something and you eat it. Then maybe you get tired, so you sleep; and when you wake up you are hungry again… .
He took off the eyeset, but found his plastic eyes felt uncomfortably naked without their protective covering, and put it back on. The first short-term goal of his new existence would be to set up a tidy house. He found Cherkassky’s limp body, dragged it to the airlock, and propped it against the outer door. It took him several minutes to position the body in such a way that it would be sure to be carried clear of the lock when the residual air exhausted. A dead body made a poor traveling companion under normal circumstances, but an exposure to zero pressure would make it even less attractive.
When he was satisfied with the arrangement of the body he went to fetch Seymour, and laid the pathetic little husk in Cherkassky’s lap.
Back in the control room he identified the relevant controls by touch, then blew the lock. Exit two more characters, he thought, leaving Sam Tallon alone on the stage. Doc Winfield had been the first; then Helen, with the red hair and whiskey-colored eyes. It occurred to him that she might not be dead, but there was no way he could find out, and he was straying into the wrong type of thinking again.
Tallon went to the galley, lifted one can from each supply magazine, and opened them. He identified their contents and memorized where each had come from in the row of dispensers. As a welcome change from fish, he decided on steak, and while it was cooking he found a refrigerated compartment with stacks of plastic tubular containers of beer. Thankful that Parane, where the Lyle Star had originated, had both adequate protein supplies and a sensible outlook on the use of alcohol, he settled down to his first meal in alien space. When he was finished he disposed of the plastic plates and utensils, then sat down and waited for nothing to happen.
Some time later he grew tired and went to find a bed. Sleep was a long time in coming because he was many thousands of light-years from the rest of his kind.
Tallon kept it up for four cycles of activity and sleep before concluding he was bound to go mad if he continued this way. He decided he had to have a long-term goal to give his life direction, even if the term were longer than his life span and the goal unattainable.
He went into the control room and explored the central computing bank with his fingertips, wishing he had paid more attention to it while eyes were still available to him. It took him some time to satisfy himself that it was a standard type, based on the cybernetic intelligence amplifier. Null-space travel demanded that a ship position itself within portals measuring no more than two light-seconds across. The standards of precision involved required that the computing facility and the astrogation complex be unified into a single automatic control system.
The control complex was fully programmed to account for variants, such as variable magnitude stars, in the perceived celestial sphere; but provision was also made to prevent positional fixes from being affected by rare and unpredictable phenomena like novas and supernovas. This took the form of data injection panels that provided pathways right into, among other things, the instruction store. The data injector had not changed since the first days of null-space travel. Tallon had heard that the relatively primitive system was retained solely because it enabled a reasonably competent engineer to convert a spaceship into an interstellar probe.