The Stars My Destination

by Alfred Bester

Blasphemy came easily to him: it was half his speech, all his life. He had been raised in the gutter school of the twenty-fifth century and spoke nothing but the gutter tongue.

Of all brutes in the world he was among the least valuable alive and most likely to survive.

a man wearing a hollow glass leg in which goldfish swam,

They corked up in their spacesuits,

“A Snow Joint. Might have known he’d be running a dive for hopheads too.” This den catered to Disease Collectors, the most hopeless of neurotic-addicts. They lay in their hospital beds, suffering mildly from illegally induced para-measles, para-flu, para-malaria; devotedly attended by nurses in starched white uniforms, and avidly enjoying their illegal illness and the attention it brought.

They were rebuilt and destroyed again in the war of the World Restoration in the twenty-first century.

You’ve changed me completely. I’m a sane man again.” He pressed his face to the wall too, and they kissed through three inches of lead glass.

I’m not a robot. I’m a freak of the universe…a thinking animal…and