Bester, Alfred - Tiger, Tiger

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FBP5: V1.0. Tiger! Tiger! By Alfred Bester

" Dearly beloved we are gathered here today as mark of respect at the time of the passing on of

our dear friend. This was a paperback book which came into being over 20 years ago, full of hope

and promise. Now that life has ended. Advancing years combined with a certain stiffness of the

spine (old glue!) and a tendency to curl at the edges, mean that all that remains after the

rigours of its final scanning is a tattered pile which we will now commit respectfully to the bin

(I also loathed the cover!). Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain knowledge of the

resurrection to eternal life....as an e-book. You could say that this book died for your sins, so

that you may have the pleasure of its presence on your hard drive forever more. Here Endeth the

lesson. ....Amen. "

So William Gibson invented Cyberpunk? Maybe it was Bruce Bethke? Read this, published in the early

1950's, and then think back. You can see Bester's influence on a whole range of writers since

then, from Heinlein to most of the 'New Wave' and their ilk.

Unfortunately as a writer Bester's range was a little limited, and he tended to revisit the same

material again and again. The similarities between this and his other great book 'The Demolished

Man' are such that after I haven't read them for a while they seem to merge into one. Demolished

is in many ways more ambitious, but this is my favourite because of Gully. He's a great character.

On the other hand 50 years later, I don't think either writers or readers would let him get away

with what he does to Robin Wednesbury! ...Enjoy...AFB

P.S. See notes at end re new posting strategy

'This was a golden age, a tune of high adventure, rich living and hard dying. . but nobody

thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but

nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes; a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody

loved it'.

'It is against the seething background of the twenty-fourth century that the vengeful history of

Gulliver Foyle begins.'

Gully Foyle - liar, lecher, ghoul, walking cancer. Obsessed by vengeance, he's also the twenty-

fourth century's most valuable commodity - but he doesn't know it.

His story is one of the great classics of science fiction.

'A definitive statement in Wide Screen Baroque, a kind of free-wheeling interplanetary adventure,

full of brilliant scenery, dramatic sciences, and a joyous 1 taking for granted of the unlikely'

Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree Penguin Science Fiction

Tiger! Tiger!

Alfred Bester was born in 1913 and was educated at Pennsylvania University, where he studied

science and the fine arts. He became a professional author after winning a writing competition in

1939. His novel The Demolished Man was voted the outstanding book of the year by the eleventh

World Science Fiction Congress, and is also published in Penguins. His most recent books are Extro

(1975) and The Light Fantastic (1971: a collection of short stories).

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth. Middlesex, England Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue, New York,

New York 10022, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books

Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R IB4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, x82-x9o

Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published is the U.S.A. 1955 Published in Great

Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson 1956 Published in Penguin Books x967 Reprinted 1974, 1979 Copyright

p Alfred Best-, 1955 AD rights reserved Made and printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd,

London, Reading and Fakenham Set in Monotype Plantin Except in the United States of America, this

book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of

binding or cover other than that is which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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Prologue

This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying . . . but nobody

thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice. . , but

nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody

loved it.

All the habitable worlds of the solar system were occupied. Three planets and eight satellites and

eleven million millions of people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds

still yearned for other times, as always, as ever. The solar system seethed with activity . . .

fighting, feeding, and breeding, learning the new technologies that spewed forth almost before the

old had been mastered, girding itself for the first exploration of the stars in deep space; but

`Where are the new frontiers?' the Romantics cried while the frontier of the mind opened in a

dramatic incident that took place in a laboratory on Callisto at the turn of the twenty-fourth

century.

A researcher named Jaunte set fire to his bench and himself (accidentally) and let out a yell for

help with particular reference to a fire extinguisher. Who so surprised as Jaunte and his

colleagues when he found himself standing alongside said extinguisher which was seventy feet

removed from his lab bench.

They put Jaunte out and went into the whys and wherefores of his seventy-foot journey.

Teleportation . . . the transportation of oneself through space by an effort of the mind alone . .

. had long been a theoretic concept, and there were a few hundred badly documented proofs that it

had happened is the past. This was the first time that it had ever taken place before professional

observers.

They investigated the Jaunte Effect savagely. This was something too earth-shaking to handle with

kid gloves, and anyway Jaunte was anxious to make his name immortal. He made his will and said

farewell to his friends. Jaunte knew he was going to die because his fellow researchers were

determined to kill him. There was no doubt about that.

Twelve psychologists, Para-psychologists and neurometrists of varying specialization were carried

in as observers. The experimenters sealed Jaunte into an unbreakable crystal tank. They opened a

water valve, feeding water into the tank, and let Jaunte watch them smash the valve handle. It was

impossible to open the tank; it was impossible to stop the flow of water.

The theory was that if it had required the threat of death to goad Jaunte into teleporting himself

in the first place, they'd damned well threaten him with death again. The tank filled quickly. The

observers collected data with the tense precision of an eclipse camera crew. Jaunte began to

drown. Then he was outside the tank, dripping and coughing explosively. He'd teleported again.

The experts examined and questioned him. They studied graphs and X-rays, neural patterns and body

chemistry. They began to get an inkling of how Jaunte had teleported. On the technical grapevine

(this had to be kept secret) they sent out a call for suicide volunteers. They were still in the

primitive stage of teleportation; death was the only spur they knew.

They briefed the volunteers thoroughly. Jaunte lectured on what he had done and how he thought he

had done it. Then they proceeded to murder the volunteers. They drowned them, hung them, burned

them; they invented new forms of slow and controlled death. There was never any doubt in any of

the subjects that death was the object.

Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, and the agonies and remorse of their murderers would make

a fascinating and horrible study, but that has no place in this history except in highlight the

monstrosity of the times. Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, but twenty per cent jaunted.

(The name became a word almost immediately.) `Bring back the romantic age,' the Romantics pleaded,

`when men can risk their lives in high adventure.' The body of knowledge grew rapidly. By the

first decade of the twenty-fourth century the principles of jaunting were established and the

first school was opened by Charles Fort Jaunte himself, then fifty-seven, immortalized, and

ashamed to admit that he had never dared jaunte again. But the primitive days were past; it was no

longer necessary to threaten a man with death to make him teleport. They had learned how to teach

man to recognize, discipline and exploit yet another resource of his limitless mind.

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How, exactly, did man teleport? One of the most unsatisfactory explanations was provided by

Spencer Thompson, publicity representative of the Jaunte Schools, in a press interview.

THOMPSON: Jaunting is like seeing; it is a natural aptitude of almost every human organism, but it

can only be developed by training and experience.

REPORTER: You mean we couldn't see without practice?

THOMPSON: Obviously you're either unmarried or have no children . . . preferably both.

(Laughter.)

REPORTER: I don't understand.

THOMPSON: Anyone who'd observed an infant learning to use its eyes, would.

REPORTER: But what is teleportation?

THOMPSON: The transportation of oneself from one locality to another by an effort of the mind

alone.

REPORTER: You mean we can think ourselves from ... Say . . . New York to Chicago?

THOMPSON: Precisely.

REPORTER: Would we arrive naked?

THOMPSON: If you started naked.

(Laughter.)

REPORTER: I mean, would our clothes teleport with us?

THOMPSON: When people teleport, they also teleport the clothes they wear and whatever they are

strong enough to carry. I hate to disappoint you, but even ladies' clothes would arrive with them.

(Laughter.)

REPORTER: But how do we do it?

THOMPSON: How do we think?

REPORTER: With our minds.

THOMPSON: And how does the mind think? What is the thinking process? Exactly how do we remember,

imagine, deduce, create? Exactly how do the brain cells operate?

REPORTER: I don't know. Nobody knows.

THOMPSON: And nobody knows exactly how we teleport either, but we know we can do it - just as we

know that we can think. Have you ever heard of Descartes? He said: Cogito ergo sum. I think,

therefore I am. We say: Cogito ergo jaunte. I think, therefore I jaunte.

If it is thought that Thompson's explanation is exasperating, inspect this report of Sir John

Kelvin to the Royal Society on the mechanism of jaunting: `We have established that the

teleportative ability is associated with the Nissl bodies, or Tigroid Substance in nerve cells.

The Tigroid Substance is easiest demonstrated by Nissls' method using 3.75 g. of methylene blue

and 1.75 g. of Venetian soap dissolved in 1,000 cc. of water.

`Where the Tigroid Substance does not appear, jaunting is impossible. Teleportation is a Tigroid

Function.' (Applause).

Any man was capable of jaunting provided he developed two faculties, visualization and

concentration. He had to visualize, completely and precisely, the spot to which he desired to

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teleport himself; and he had to concentrate the latent energy of his mind into a single thrust to

get him there. Above all, he had to have faith . . . the faith that Charles Fort Jaunte never

recovered. He had to believe he would jaunte. The slightest doubt would block the mind-thrust

necessary for teleportation.

The limitations with which every man is born necessarily limited the ability to jaunte. Some could

visualize magnificently and set the co-ordinates of their destination with precision, but lacked

the power to get there. Others had the power but could not, so to speak, see where they were

jaunting. And space set a final limitation, for no man had ever jaunted farther than a thousand

miles. He could work his way in jaunting jumps over land and water from Nome to Mexico, but no

jump could exceed a thousand miles.

By the 2420's this form of employment application blank had become a commonplace:

This space reserved for retina pattern identification

NAME (Capital Letters): .......................................(Last Middle First)

RESIDENCE (Legal): ..................................(Continent Country County)

JAUNTE CLASS (Official Rating: Check One Only):

M (1000) miles:

L (50 miles):

D (500 miles):

C (l00 miles):

X (10 miles):

V (5 miles):

The old Bureaux of Motor Vehicles took over the new job and regularly tested and classed jaunte

applicants, and the old American Automobile Association changed its initials to A.J.A.

Despite all efforts, no man had ever jaunted across the voids of space although many experts and

fools had tried. Helmut Grant, for one, who spent a month memorizing the co-ordinates of a jaunte

stage on the moon and visualized every mile of the two hundred-and-forty-thousand-mile trajectory

from Times Square to Kepler City. Grant jaunted and disappeared. They never found him. They never

found Enzio Dandridge, a Los Angeles revivalist looking for Heaven; Jacob Maria Freundlich, a

paraphysicist who should have known better than to jaunte into a deep space searching for meta-

dimensions; Shipwreck Cogan, a professional seeker after notoriety; and hundreds of others,

lunatic fringers, neurotics, escapists and suicides. Space was closed to teleportation. Jaunting

was restricted to the planets of the solar system.

But within three generations the entire solar system was on the jaunte. The transition was more

spectacular than the change-over from horse and buggy to gasoline age four centuries before. On

three planets and eight satellites, social, legal and economic structures crashed while the new

customs and laws demanded by universal jaunting mushroomed in their place.

There were land riots as the jaunting poor deserted slums to squat in plains and forests, raiding

the livestock and wildlife. There was a revolution in home and office building, labyrinths and

masking devices had to be introduced to prevent unlawful entry by jaunting. There were crashes and

panics and strikes and famines as pre-jaunte industries failed.

Plagues and pandemics raged as jaunting vagrants carried disease and vermin into defenseless

countries. Malaria, elephantiasis and the break-bone fever came north to Greenland; rabies

returned to England after an absence of three hundred years. The Japanese beetle, the citrons

scale, the chestnut blight and the elm borer spread to every corner in the world, and from one

forgotten pest-hole in Borneo, leprosy, long imagined extinct, reappeared.

Crime waves swept the planets and satellites as the underworlds took to jaunting with the night

around the clock, and there were brutalities as the police fought them without quarter. There came

a hideous return to the worst prudery of Victorianism as society fought the sexual and moral

dangers of jaunting with protocol and taboo. A cruel and vicious war broke out between the Inner

Planets, Venus, Terra and Mars, and the Outer Satellites . . . a war brought on by the economic

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and political pressures of teleportation.

Until the Jaunte Age dawned, the three inner planets (and the Moon) had lived in delicate economic

balance with the seven inhabited outer satellites; Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto of Jupiter;

Rhea and Titan of Saturn; and Lassell of Neptune. The United Outer Satellites supplied raw

materials for the Inner Planets manufactories, and a market for their finished goods. Within a

decade this balance was destroyed by jaunting.

The Outer Satellites, raw young worlds in the making, had bought seventy per cent of the L.P.

transportation production. Jaunting ended that. They had bought ninety per cent of the LP.

communications production. Jaunting ended that too. In consequence L.P. purchase of O.S. raw

materials fell off. With trade exchange destroyed it was inevitable that the economic war would

degenerate into a shooting war. Inner Planets cartels refused to ship manufacturing equipment to

the Outer Satellites, attempting to protect themselves against competition. The O.S. confiscated

the planets already in operation on their worlds, broke patent agreements, ignored royalty

obligations . . . and the war was on.

It was an age of freaks, monsters and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and

malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential

greatness of the twenty-fourth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution . . . that

progress stems from clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle

freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the solar system was trembling on the

verge of a human explosion that would transform man and make him the master of the universe.

It is against this seething background of the twenty-fourth century that the vengeful history of

Gully Foyle begins.

Part One

He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. He fought for survival with the

passion of a beast in a trap. He was delirious and rotting, but occasionally his primitive mind

emerged from the burning nightmare of survival into something resembling sanity. Then he lifted

his mute face to Eternity and muttered: `What's a matter, me? Help, you Heels. Help, is all.'

Blasphemy came easily to him; it was half his speech, all his life. He had been raised in the

gutter school of the twenty-fourth century and spoke nothing but the gutter tongue. Of all brutes

in the world he was least valuable alive and most likely to live. So he struggled to survive and

prayed in blasphemy; but occasionally his raveling mind leaped backward thirty years to his

childhood and remembered a nursery jingle:

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation.

Deep space is my dwelling place

And death's my destination.

He was Gulliver Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class, thirty years old, big boned and rough.. . and

one hundred and seventy days adrift in space. He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too

easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love. The lethargic

outlines of his character even showed in the official Merchant Marine records

FOYLE, GULLIVER -AS-128/127:OO6

EDUCATION: NONE

SKILLS: NONE

MERITS: NONE

RECOMMENDATIONS: NONE

(PERSONNEL COMMENTS)

A man of physical strength and intellectual potential stunted by lack of ambition. Energizes at

minimum. The stereotype Common Man. Some unexpected shock might possibly awaken him, but Psych

cannot find the key. Do not recommend for further promotion. Foyle has reached a dead end.

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He had reached a dead end. He had been content to drift from moment to moment of existence for

thirty years like some heavily armored creature, sluggish, and indifferent . . . Gully Foyle, the

stereotype Common Man; but now he was adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, and the

key to his awakening was in the lock. Presently it would turn and open the door to holocaust.

The spaceship Nomad drifted half-way between Mars and Jupiter. Whatever war catastrophe had

wrecked it had taken a sleek steel rocket, one hundred yards long and one hundred feet broad, and

mangled it into a skeleton on which was mounted the remains of cabins, holds, decks and bulkheads.

Great rents in the hull were blazes of light on the sunside and frosty blotches of stars on the

darkside. The S.S. Nomad was a weightless emptiness of blinding sun and jet shadow, frozen and

silent.

The wreck was filled with a floating conglomerate of frozen debris that hung within the destroyed

vessel like an instantaneous photograph of an explosion. The minute gravitational attraction of

the bits of rubble for each other was slowly drawing them into clusters which were periodically

torn apart by the passage through them of the one survivor still alive on the wreck, Gulliver

Foyle, AS-128/I27:006.

He lived in the only air-tight room left intact in the wreck, a tool locker of the main-deck

corridor. The locker was four feet wide, four feet deep and nine feet high. It was the size of a

giant's coffin. Six hundred years before, it had been judged the most exquisite Oriental torture

to imprison a man in a cage that size for a few weeks. Yet Foyle had existed in that lightless

cage for five months, twenty days and four hours.

`Who are you?'

`Gully Foyle is my name.'

`Where are you from?'

`Terra is my nation.'

'Where are you now?'

`Deep space is my dwelling place.'

`Where are you bound?'

`Death's my destination.'

On the one hundred and seventy-first day of his fight for survival, Foyle answered these questions

and awoke. His heart hammered and his throat burned. He groped in the dark for the air tank, which

shared his coffin with him and checked it. The tank was empty. Another would have to be moved in

at once. So this day would commence with an extra skirmish with death which Foyle accepted with

mute endurance.

He felt through the locker shelves and located a torn spacesuit. It was the only one aboard Nomad

and Foyle no longer remembered where or how he had found it. He had sealed the tear with emergency

spray, but had no way of refilling or replacing the empty oxygen cartridges on the back. Foyle got

into the suit. It would hold enough air from the locker to allow him five minutes in vacuum . . .

no more.

Foyle opened the locker door and plunged out into the black frost of space. The air in the locker

puffed out with him and its moisture congealed into a tiny snow cloud that drifted down the torn

main-deck corridor. Foyle heaved at the exhausted air tank, floated it out of the locker and

abandoned it. One minute was gone.

He turned and propelled himself through the floating debris towards the hatch to the ballast hold.

He did not run; his gait was the unique locomotion of free-fall and weightlessness . . . thrusts

with foot, elbow and hand against deck, wall and corner, a slow-motion darting through space like

a bat flying under water. Foyle shot through the hatch into the darkside ballast hold. Two minutes

were gone.

Like all spaceships, Nomad was ballasted and stiffened with the mass of her gas tanks laid down

the length of her keel like a long lumber raft tapped at the sides by a labyrinth of pipe

fittings. Foyle took a minute disconnecting an air tank. He had no way of knowing whether it was

full or already exhausted; whether he would fight it back to his locker only to discover that it

was empty and his life was ended. Once a week he endured this game of space-poker.

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There was a roaring in his ears; the air in his spacesuit was rapidly going foul. He yanked the

massy cylinder towards the ballast hatch, ducked to let it sail over his head, then thrust himself

after it. He swung the tank through the hatch. Four minutes had elapsed and he was shaking and

blacking out. He guided the tank down the main-deck corridor and bulled it into the tool locker.

He slammed the locked door, dogged it, found a hammer on a shelf and swung it thrice against the

frozen tank to loosen the valve. Foyle twisted the handle grimly. With the last of his strength he

unsealed the helmet of his spacesuit, lest he suffocate within the suit while the locker filled

with air . . . if this tank contained air. He fainted, as he had fainted so often before, never

knowing whether this was death.

`Who are you?'

'Gully Foyle.'

`Where are you from?'

'Terra'

`Where are you now?'

`Space.'

`Where are you bound?'

He awoke. He was alive. He wasted no time on prayer or thanks but continued the business of

survival. In the darkness he explored the locker shelves where he kept his rations. There were

only a few packets left. Since he was already wearing the patched spacesuit he might just as well

run the gauntlet of vacuum again and replenish his supplies.

He flooded his spacesuit with sir from the tank, resealed his helmet and sailed out into the frost

and light again. He squirmed down the main-deck corridor and ascended the remains of a stairway to

control-deck, which was no more than a roofed corridor in space, most of the walls were destroyed.

With the sun on his right and the stars on his left, Foyle shot aft towards the galley storeroom.

Halfway down the corridor he passed a door-frame still standing foursquare between deck and roof.

The leaf still hung on its hinges, half open, a door to nowhere. Behind it was all space and the

steady stars.

As Foyle passed the door he had a quick view of himself reflected in the polished chrome of the

leaf . . . Gully Foyle, a giant black creature, bearded, crusted with dried blood and filth,

emaciated, with sick, patient eyes . . . and followed always by a stream of floating debris, the

raffle disturbed by his motion and following him through space like the tail of a festering comet.

Foyle turned into the galley storeroom and began looting with the methodical speed of five months'

habit. Most of the bottled goods were frozen solid and exploded. Many of the canned goods had lost

their containers, for tin crumbles to dust in the absolute zero of space. Foyle gathered up

ration; packets, concentrates and a chunk of ice from the burst water tank. He threw everything

into a large copper cauldron and then turned and darted out of the storeroom, carrying the

cauldron.

At the door to nowhere Foyle glanced at himself again, reflected in the chrome leaf framed in the

stars. Then he stopped his motion in bewilderment. He stared at the stars behind the door, which

had become familiar friends after five months. There was an intruder among them; a comet, it

seemed, with an invisible head and a short, spurting tail. Then Foyle realized he was staring at a

spaceship, stern rockets flaring as it accelerated on a sunward course that must pass him.

`No,' he muttered. `No, man. No.' He was continually suffering firm hallucinations. He turned to

resume the journey back to his coffin. Then he looked again. It was still a spaceship, stern

rockets flaring as it accelerated on a sunward course which must pass him. He discussed the

illusion with Eternity.

`Six months already,' he said in his gutter tongue. `Is it now? You listen a me, Heels. I talkin'

a deal, is all. I look again, sweet Heels. If it's a ship, I'm yours. You own me. But if it's a

gaff, man . . . if it's no ship . . . I unseal right now and blow my guts. We both play square,

us. Now reach me the sign, yes or no, is all.'

He looked for a third time. For the third time he saw a spaceship, stern rockets flaring as it

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accelerated on a sunward course which must pass him.

It was the sign. He believed. He was saved.

Foyle shoved off and went hurtling down control-deck corridor towards the bridge. But at the

companionway stairs he restrained himself. He could not remain conscious for more than a few

moments without refilling his spacesuit. He gave the approaching spaceship one pleading look, then

shot down to the tool locker and pumped his suit full.

He mounted to the control bridge. Through the starboard observation port he saw the spaceship,

stern rockets still flaring, evidently making a major alteration in course, for it was bearing

down on him very slowly.

On the panel marked FLARES, Foyle pressed the DISTRESS button. There was a three-second pause

during which he suffered. Then white radiance blinded him as the distress signal went off in three

triple bursts, nine prayers for help. Foyle pressed the button twice again, and twice more the

flares flashed in space while the radioactives incorporated in their combustion set up a static

howl that must register on any waveband of any receiver.

The stranger's jets cut off. He had been seen. He would be saved. He was reborn. He exulted.

Foyle darted back to his locker and replenished his spacesuit again. He began to weep. He started

to gather his possessions . . . a faceless clock which he kept wound just to listen to the

ticking, a lug wrench with a hand-shaped handle which he would hold in lonely moments, an egg-

sliver upon whose wires he would pluck primitive tunes . . . He dropped them in his excitement,

hunted for them in the dark, then began to laugh at himself.

He filled his spacesuit with air once more and capered back to the bridge. He punched a flare

button labeled: RESCUE. From the hull of the Nomad shot a sunlet that burst and hung, flooding

miles of space with a harsh white light.

`Come on, baby you,' Foyle crooned. `Hurry up, man. Come on, baby, baby you.' Like a ghost

torpedo, the stranger slid into the outermost rim of light, approaching slowly, looking him over.

For a moment Foyle's heart constricted; the ship was behaving so cautiously that he feared she was

an enemy vessel from the Outer Satellites. Then he saw the famous red and blue emblem on her side,

the trademark of the mighty industrial clan of Presteign; Presteign of Terra, powerful,

munificent, beneficent And he knew this was a sister ship, for the Nomad was also Presteign owned.

He knew this was an angel from space hovering over him.

`Sweet, sister,' Foyle crooned. `Baby angel, fly away home with me.' The ship came abreast of

Foyle, illuminated ports along its side glowing with friendly light, its name and registry number

clearly visible in illuminated figures on the hull: Vorga-T: 1339. The ship was alongside him in a

moment, passing him in a second, disappearing in a third.

The sister had spurned him; the angel had abandoned him.

Foyle stopped dancing and crooning. He stared in dismay. He leaped to the flare panel and slapped

buttons. Distress signals, landing, takeoff and quarantine flares burst from the hull of the Nomad

in a madness of white, red and green light, pulsing, pleading . . . and Vorga-T: 1339 passed

silently and implacably, stern jets flaring again as it accelerated on a sunward course.

So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived and he died. After thirty years of existence and six

months of torture, Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man was no more. The key turned in the lock

of his soul and the door was opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man for ever.

`You pass me by,' he said with slow mounting fury. `You leave me rot like a dog. You leave me die,

Vorga . . . Vorga-T: 1339, No. I get out of here, me. I follow you, Vorga. I find you, Yorga. I

pay you back, me. I rot you. I kill you, Yorga. I kill you deadly.'

The acid of fury ran through him, eating away the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a

cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of

Gully Foyle. He was dedicated.

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`Vorga, I kill you deadly.' He did what the cipher could not do; he rescued himself.

For two days he combed the wreckage in five-minute forays, and devised a harness for his

shoulders. He attached an air tank to the harness and connected the tank to his spacesuit helmet

with an improvised hose. He wriggled through space like an ant dragging a log, but he had the

freedom of the Nomad for all time.

He thought.

In the control bridge he taught himself to use the few navigation instruments that were still

unbroken, studying the standard manuals that littered the wrecked navigation room. In the ten

years of his service in space he had never dreamed of attempting such a thing, despite the rewards

of promotion and pay; but now he had Vorga-T: 1339 to reward him.

He took sights. The Nomad was drifting in space on the ecliptic, three hundred million miles from

the sun. Before him were spread the constellations Perseus, Andromeda and Pisces. Hanging almost

in the foreground was a dusty orange spot that was Jupiter, distinctly a planetary disc to the

naked eye. With any luck he could make a course for Jupiter and rescue.

Jupiter was not, could never be habitable. Like all the outer planets beyond the asteroid orbits,

it was a frozen mass of methane and ammonia; but its four largest satellites swarmed with cities

and populations now at war with the Inner Planets. He would be a war prisoner, but he had to stay

alive to settle accounts with Vorga-T: 1339. Foyle inspected the engine-room of the Nomad. There

was Hi-Thrust fuel remaining in the tanks and one of the four tail jets was still in operative

condition. Foyle found the engine-room manuals and studied them. He repaired the connection

between fuel tanks and the one jet chamber. The tanks were on the sunside of the wreck and warmed

above freezing point. The Hi-Thrust was still liquid, but it would not flow. In freefall there was

no gravity to draw the fuel down the pipes.

Foyle studied a space manual and learned something about theoretical gravity. If he could put the

Nomad into a spin, centrifugal force would impart enough navigation to the ship to draw fuel down

into the combustion chamber of the jet. If he could fire the combustion chamber, the unequal

thrust of the one jet would impart a spin to the Nomad.

But he couldn't fire the jet without first having the spin; and he couldn't get the spin without

first firing the jet.

He thought his way out of the deadlock; he was inspired by Vorga.

Foyle opened the drainage petcock in the combustion chamber of the jet and tortuously filled the

chamber with fuel by hand. He had primed the pump. Now, if he ignited the fuel, it would fire long

enough to impart the spin and start gravity. Then the flow from the tanks would commence and the

rocketing would continue.

He tried matches.

Matches will not burn in the vacuum of space.

He tried flint and steel.

Sparks will not glow in the absolute zero of space.

He thought of red-hot filaments.

He had no electric power of any description aboard the Nomad to make a filament red-hot.

He found texts and read. Although he was blacking out frequently and close to complete collapse,

he thought and planned. He was inspired to greatness by Vorga.

Foyle brought ice from the frozen galley tanks, melted it and added water to the jet combustion

chamber. The fuel and the water were non-miscible, they did not mix. The water floated in a thin

layer over the fuel.

From the chemical stores Foyle brought a silvery bit of wire, pure sodium metal. He poked the wire

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through the open petcock. The sodium ignited when it touched the water and flared with high heat.

The heat touched off the Hi-Thrust which burst in a needle flame from the petcock. Foyle closed

the petcock with a wrench. The ignition held in the chamber and the lone aft jet slammed out flame

with a soundless vibration that shook the ship.

`The off-centre thrust of the jet twisted the Nomad into a slow spin. The torque imparted a slight

gravity. Weight returned. The floating debris that cluttered the hull fell to decks, walls and

ceilings; and the gravity kept the fuel feeding from tanks to combustion chamber.

Foyle wasted no time on cheers. He left the engine room and struggled forward in desperate haste

for a final, fatal observation from the control bridge. This would tell him whether the Nomad was

committed to a wild plunge out into the no-return of deep space, or a course for Jupiter and

rescue.

The slight gravity made his air tank almost impossible to drag. The sudden forward surge of

acceleration shook loose masses of debris which flew backward through the Nomad. As Foyle

struggled up the companionway stairs to control-deck, the rubble from the bridge came hurtling

back down the corridor and smashed into him. He was caught up in this tumbleweed in space, rolled

back the length of the empty corridor and brought up against the galley bulkhead with an impact

that shattered his last hold on consciousness. He lay pinned in the centre of half a ton of

wreckage, helpless, barely alive, but still raging for vengeance.

`Who are you?'

`Where are you from?'

'Where are you now?'

`Where are you bound?'

Between Mars and Jupiter is spread the broad belt of the asteroids. Of the thousands, known and

unknown, most unique to the Freak Century was the Sargasso Asteroid, a tiny planet manufactured of

natural rock and wreckage, salvaged by its inhabitants in the course of two hundred years.

They were savages, the only savages of the twenty-fourth century; descendants of a research team

of scientists that had been lost and marooned in the asteroid belt two centuries before when their

ship had failed. By the time their descendants were rediscovered they had built up a world and a

culture of their own, and preferred to remain in space, salvaging and spoiling, and practicing a

barbaric travesty of the scientific method they remembered from their forebears. They called

themselves The Scientific People. The world promptly forgot them.

S.S. Nomad looped through space, neither on a course for Jupiter nor the far stars, but drifting

across the asteroid belt in, the slow spiral of a dying animalcule. It passed within a mile of the

Sargasso Asteroid, and it was immediately captured by The Scientific People to be incorporated

into their little planet.

They found Foyle.

He awoke once while he was being carried in triumph on a litter through the natural and artificial

passages within the asteroid. They were constructed of meteor metal, stone and hull plates. Some

of the plates still bore names long forgotten to the history of space travel: INDUS QUEEN, TERRA;

SYRTUS GAMBLER, MARS; THREE-RING CIRCUS, SATURN. The passages led to great halls, storerooms,

apartments, and homes, all built of salvaged ships cemented into the asteroid.

In rapid succession Foyle was borne through an ancient Ganymede scow, a Lassel ice-borer, a

captain's barge, a Callisto heavy cruiser, a twenty-second-century fuel transport with glass tanks

still filled with smoke rocket fuel. Two centuries of salvage were gathered in this hive: armories

of weapons, libraries of books, museums of costume, warehouses of tools, rations, drink,

chemicals, synthetics, and 'surrogates.

A crowd around the litter was howling triumphantly.

`Quant Suff!' they shouted. A woman's chorus began an elated bleating: ` `Ammonium bromide gr. y

Potassium bromide gr. 3 Sodium bromide gr. 2 Citric acid Quant. Suff.'

'Quant Suff!' The Scientific People roared. `Quant Suff!' Foyle fainted.

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Bester, Alfred - Tiger, Tiger

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