The Stars My Destination

by Alfred Bester

You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.

SF is a difficult and transient literature at the best of times, ultimately problematic. It claims to treat of the future, all the what-ifs and if-this-goes-ons; but the what-ifs and if-this-goes-ons are always founded here and hard in today. Whatever today is. To put it another way, nothing dates harder than historical fiction and science fiction. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical fiction and his SF are of a piece—and both have dated in a way in which Sherlock Holmes, pinned to his time in the gaslit streets of Victorian London, has not.

When I read this book—or one very similar; you can no more read the same book again than you can step into the same river—in the early 1970s, as a young teenager, I read it under the title Tiger! Tiger! It’s a title I prefer to the rather more upbeat The Stars My Destination. It is a title of warning, of admiration. God, we are reminded in Blake’s poem, created the tiger too. The God who made the lamb also made the carnivores that prey upon it. And Gully Foyle, our hero, is a predator. We meet him and are informed that he is everyman, a nonentity; then Bester lights the touchpaper, and we stand back and watch him flare and burn and illuminate: almost illiterate, stupid, single-minded, amoral (not in the hip sense of being too cool for morality, but simply utterly, blindly selfish), he is a murderer—perhaps a multiple murderer—a rapist, a monster. A tiger.

The Stars My Destination is, after all, the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific McGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief woman… But what makes The Stars My Destination more interesting—and ten years on, less dated—than most cyberpunk, is watching Gully Foyle become a moral creature, during his sequence of transfigurations (keep all heroes going long enough, and they become gods). The tiger tattoos force him to learn control. His emotional state is no longer written in his face—it forces him to move beyond predation, beyond rage, back to the womb, as it were. (And what a sequence of wombs the book gives us: the coffin, the Nomad, the Goufre Martel, St. Pat’s, and finally the Nomad again.) It gives us more than that. It gives us: Birth. Symmetry. Hate.

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 million people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds still yearned for other times, as always. 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 far stars in deep space; but— “Where are the new frontiers?” the Romantics cried, unaware that the frontier of the mind had opened in a laboratory on Callisto at the turn of the twenty-fourth century.

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 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.

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-fifth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution…that progress stems from the 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-fifth century that the vengeful history of Gulliver Foyle begins.

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.

“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.

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 roulette.

He slammed the locker 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.

“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, take-off, 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 forever. “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, Vorga. I pay you back, me. I rot you. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you filthy.” 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. “Vorga, I kill you filthy.”

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.

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.

He recoiled in terror as the orderly thrust the picture of a hideous tattooed face before him. It was a Maori mask. Cheeks, chin, nose, and eyelids were decorated with stripes and swirls. Across the brow was blazoned NÓMAD. Foyle stared, then cried out in agony. The picture was a mirror. The face was his own.

Robin Wednesbury’s apartment was in a massive building set alone on the shore of Green Bay. The apartment house looked as though a magician had removed it from a city residential area and abandoned it amidst the Wisconsin pines. Buildings like this were a commonplace in the jaunting world. With self-contained heat and light plants, and jaunting to solve the transportation problem, single and multiple dwellings were built in desert, forest, and wilderness. The apartment itself was a four-room flat, heavily insulated to protect neighbors from Robin’s telesending. It was crammed with books, music, paintings, and prints…all evidence of the cultured and lonely life of this unfortunate wrong-way telepath.

An expression of possessed cunning appeared on the hideous face. “I’m holed up in General Hospital, me. It’s my base of operations, see? I’m settling something, Miss Robin. I got a debt to pay off, me. I had to find out where a certain ship is. Now I got to pay her back. Now I rot you, Vorga. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you filthy!” He stopped shouting and glared at her in wild triumph. Robin backed away in alarm. “For God’s sake, what are you talking about?” “Vorga. Vorga-T:1339. Ever hear of her, Miss Robin? I found out where she is from Bo’ness & Uig’s ship registry. Bo’ness & Uig are out in SanFran. I went there, me, the time when you was learning us the crosstown jaunte stages. Went out to SanFran, me. Found Vorga, me. She’s in Vancouver shipyards. She’s owned by Presteign of Presteign. Heard of him, Miss Robin? Presteign’s the biggest man on Terra, is all. But he won’t stop me. I’ll kill Vorga filthy. And you won’t stop me neither, Miss Robin.”

“Got you right here,” Foyle repeated. “You know what they do to spies? They cut information out of them. They cut you apart, Miss Robin. They take you apart, piece by piece—” The Negro girl screamed. Foyle nodded happily and took her shaking shoulders in his hands. “I got you, is all, girl. You can’t even run from me because all I got to do is tip Intelligence and where are you? There ain’t nothing nobody can do to stop me; not the hospital or even Mr. Holy Mighty Presteign of Presteign.” “Get out, you filthy, hideous…thing. Get out!” “You don’t like my face, Miss Robin? There ain’t nothing you can do about that either.” Suddenly he picked her up and carried her to a deep couch. He threw her down on the couch. “Nothing,” he repeated.

In the homes of the wealthy, the rooms of the female members were blind, without windows or doors, open only to the jaunting of intimate members of the family. Thus was morality maintained and chastity defended. But since Olivia Presteign was herself blind to normal sight, she could not jaunte. Consequently her suite was entered through doors closely guarded by ancient retainers in the Presteign clan livery. Olivia Presteign was a glorious albino. Her hair was white silk, her skin was white satin, her nails, her lips, and her eyes were coral. She was beautiful and blind in a wonderful way, for she could see in the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields.

Presteign restrained his impatience and went through the tedious ceremony of swearing in the 497th Mr. Presto in the hierarchy of Presteign Prestos who managed the shops in the Presteign retail division. Until recently the man had had a face and body of his own. Now, after years of cautious testing and careful indoctrination, he had been elected to join the Prestos. After six months of surgery and psycho-conditioning, he was identical with the other 496 Mr. Prestos and to the idealized portrait of Mr. Presto which hung behind Presteign’s dais…a kindly, honest man resembling Abraham Lincoln, a man who instantly inspired affection and trust. Around the world purchasers entered an identical Presteign store and were greeted by an identical manager, Mr. Presto. He was rivaled, but not surpassed, by the Kodak clan’s Mr. Kwik and Montgomery Ward’s Uncle Monty.

Presteign touched a control. The still life in the star chamber came alive. The organist played, the librarian sorted books, the secretary typed, the bartender shook drinks. It was spectacular; and the impact, carefully calculated by industrial psychometrists, established control for Presteign and put visitors at a disadvantage.

Every child in the world imagines that its phantasy world is unique to itself. Psychiatry knows that the joys and terrors of private phantasies are a common heritage shared by all mankind. Fears, guilts, terrors, and shames could be interchanged, from one man to the next, and none would notice the difference. The therapy department at Combined Hospital had recorded thousands of emotional tapes and boiled them down to one all-inclusive all-terrifying performance in Nightmare Theater. Foyle awoke, panting and sweating, and never knew that he had awakened. He was in the clutch of the serpent-haired bloody-eyed Eumenides. He was pursued, entrapped, precipitated from heights, burned, flayed, bowstringed, vermin-covered, devoured. He screamed. He ran. The radar Hobble-Field in the Theater clogged his steps and turned them into the ghastly slow motion of dream-running. And through the cacophony of grinding, shrieking, moaning, pursuing that assailed his ears, muttered the thread of a persistent voice. “Where is Nomad where is Nomad where is Nomad where is Nomad where is Nomad?” “Vorga,” Foyle croaked. “Vorga.” He had been inoculated by his own fixation. His own nightmare had rendered him immune.

“I don’t know about Nomad, nothing.” “No, no, Foyle, that won’t do. You show up with Nomad tattooed across your face. Fresh tattooed. Intelligence checks and finds you were aboard Nomad when she sailed. Foyle, Gulliver: AS:128/127:006, Mechanic’s Mate, 3rd Class. As if all this isn’t enough to throw Intelligence into a tizzy, you come back in a private launch that’s been missing fifty years. Man, you’re cooking in the reactor. Intelligence wants the answers to all these questions. And you ought to know how Central Intelligence butchers its answers out of people.” Foyle started. Dagenham nodded as he saw his point sink home. “Which is why I think you’ll listen to reason. We want information, Foyle. I tried to trick it out of you; admitted. I failed because you’re too tough; admitted. Now I’m offering an honest deal. We’ll protect you if you’ll co-operate. If you don’t, you’ll spend five years in an Intelligence lab having information chopped out of you.” It was not the prospect of the butchery that frightened Foyle, but the thought of the loss of freedom. A man had to be free to avenge himself, to raise money and find Vorga again, to rip and tear and gut Vorga.

“But you were a fool trying to blow up Vorga like that. You’re like a wild beast trying to punish the trap that injured it. Steel isn’t alive. It doesn’t think. You can’t punish Vorga.” “Don’t know what you mean, girl. Vorga passed me by.” “You punish the brain, Gully. The brain that sets the trap. Find out who was aboard Vorga. Find out who gave the order to pass you by. Punish him.” “Yeah. How?” “Learn to think, Gully. The head that could figure out how to get Nomad under way and how to put a bomb together ought to be able to figure that out. But no more bombs; brains instead. Locate a member of Vorga’s crew. He’ll tell you who was aboard. Track them down. Find out who gave the order. Then punish him. But it’ll take time, Gully…time and money; more than you’ve got.” “I got a whole life, me.”

“There’s been a change,” Dagenham said dryly. “Last time we talked your dialogue consisted entirely of ‘Go to hell.’” “Go to hell, Dagenham, if it’ll make you feel any better.” “Your repartee’s improved; your speech, too. You’ve changed,” Dagenham said. “Changed a damned sight too much and a damned sight too fast. I don’t like it. What’s happened to you?” “I’ve been going to night school.” “You’ve had ten months in this night school.” “Ten months!” Foyle echoed in amazement. “That long?” “Ten months without sight and without sound. Ten months in solitary. You ought to be broke.” “Oh, I’m broke, all right.” “You ought to be whining. I was right. You’re unusual. At this rate it’s going to take too long. We can’t wait. I’d like to make a new offer.” “Make it.” “Ten per cent of Nomad’s bullion. Two million.” “Two million!” Foyle exclaimed. “Why didn’t you offer that in the first place?” “Because I didn’t know your caliber. Is it a deal?” “Almost. Not yet.” “What else?” “I get out of Gouffre Martel.” “Naturally.” “And someone else, too.” “It can be arranged.” Dagenham’s voice sharpened. “Anything else?” “I get access to Presteign’s files.” “Out of the question. Are you insane? Be reasonable.” “His shipping files.” “What for?” “A list of personnel aboard one of his ships.” “Oh.” Dagenham’s eagerness revived. “That, I can arrange. Anything else?” “No.” “Then it’s a deal.” Dagenham was delighted.

She laughed. She flung her arms about him and kissed him, and he returned the embrace. They babbled excitedly. They sank down on the soft grass again, weary, but unable to rest, eager, impatient, all life before them. “Hello, Gully, darling Gully. Hello Gully, after all this time.” “Hello, Jiz.” “I told you we’d meet some day…some day soon. I told you, darling. And this is the day.” “The night.” “The night, so it is. But no more murmuring in the night along the Whisper Line. No more night for us, Gully, dear.” Suddenly they became aware that they were nude, lying close, no longer separated. Jisbella fell silent but did not move. He clasped her, almost angrily, and enveloped her with a desire that was no less than hers. When dawn came, he saw that she was lovely: long and lean with smoky red hair and a generous mouth. But when dawn came, she saw his face.

“Never mind. Hang around a little. Tell me about the happy life. What’s so happy about it?” “Well,” Quatt said reflectively. “It’s having everything you wanted when you were a kid. If you can have everything at fifty that you wanted when you were fifteen, you’re happy. Now when I was fifteen…” And Quatt went on and on describing the symbols, ambitions, and frustrations of his boyhood which he was now satisfying until Baker came out of the operating theater.

They skidded around a corner into a shrieking mob of post-operative patients, bird men with fluttering wings, mermaids dragging themselves along the floor like seals, hermaphrodites, giants, pygmies, two-headed twins, centaurs, and a mewling sphinx. They clawed at Jisbella and Quatt in terror. “Get him off the trolley,” Jisbella yelled. Quatt yanked Foyle off the trolley. Foyle came to his feet and sagged. Jisbella took his arm, and between them Sam and Jiz hauled him through a door into a ward filled with Baker’s temporal freaks…subjects with accelerated time sense, darting about the ward with the lightning rapidity of humming birds and emitting piercing batlike squeals.

Foyle ran water, soaked his face, rubbed in shave ointment, and washed the beard off. Then he leaned close to the mirror and inspected himself, unaware that Jisbella’s head was close to his as she too stared into the mirror. Not a mark of tattooing remained. Both sighed. “It’s clean,” Foyle said. “Clean. He did the job.” Suddenly he leaned further forward and inspected himself more closely. His face looked new to him, as new as it looked to Jisbella. “I’m changed. I don’t remember looking like this. Did he do surgery on me too?” “No,” Jisbella said. “What’s inside you changed it. That’s the ghoul you’re seeing, along with the liar and the cheat.” “For God’s sake! Layoff. Let me alone!” “Ghoul,” Jisbella repeated, staring at Foyle’s face with glowing eyes. “Liar. Cheat.” He took her shoulders and shoved her out into the companionway. She went sailing down into the main lounge, caught a guide bar and spun herself around. “Ghoul!” she cried. “Liar! Cheat! Ghoul! Lecher! Beast!” Foyle pursued her, seized her again and shook her violently. Her red hair burst out of the clip that gathered it at the nape of her neck and floated out like a mermaid’s tresses. The burning expression on her face transformed Foyle’s anger into passion. He enveloped her and buried his new face in her breast. “Lecher,” Jiz murmured. “Animal…” “Oh, Jiz…” “The light,” Jisbella whispered. Foyle reached out blindly toward the wall switches and pressed buttons, and the Saturn Weekender drove on toward the as...

Foyle stared at the old man, took a step toward him, and then stopped, fists clenched, throat working as fury arose within him. And Jisbella, looking at Foyle, cried out in horror. The old tattooing had returned to his face, blood red against the pallor of the skin, scarlet instead of black, truly a tiger mask in color as well as design. “Gully!” she cried. “My God! Your face!” Foyle ignored her and stood glaring at J♂seph while the old man made beseeching gestures, motioned to them to enter the interior of the asteroid, and then disappeared. Only then did Foyle turn to Jisbella and ask: “What? What did you say?” Through the clear globe of the helmet she could see his face distinctly. And as the rage within Foyle died away, Jisbella saw the blood-red tattooing fade and disappear. “Did you see that joker?” Foyle demanded. “That was J♂seph. Did you see him begging and pleading after what he did to me…? What did you say?” “Your face, Gully. I know what’s happened to your face.” “What are you talking about?” “You wanted something that would control you, Gully. Well, you’ve got it. Your face. It—” Jisbella began to laugh hysterically. “You’ll have to learn control now, Gully. You’ll never be able to give way to emotion…any emotion…because—”

“I’m going to show you something, Gully.” “What?” “How much I despise you.” Jisbella slapped him thrice. Stung by the blows, Foyle started up furiously. Jisbella picked up a hand mirror and held it before him. “Look at yourself, Gully,” she said quietly. “Look at your face.” He looked. He saw the old tattoo marks flaming blood-red under the skin, turning his face into a scarlet and white tiger mask. He was so chilled by the appalling spectacle that his rage died at once, and simultaneously the mask disappeared. “My God…” he whispered. “Oh my God…” “I had to make you lose your temper to show you,” Jisbella said. “What’s it mean, Jiz? Did Baker goof the job?” “I don’t think so. I think you’ve got scars under the skin, Gully…from the original tattooing and then from the bleaching. Needle scars. They don’t show normally, but they do show, blood red, when your emotions take over and your heart begins pumping blood…when you’re furious or frightened or passionate or possessed… Do you understand?” He shook his head, still staring at his face, touching it in bewilderment. “You said you wished you could carry me in your pocket to stick pins in you when you lose control. You’ve got something better than that, Gully, or worse, poor darling. You’ve got your face.” “No!” he said. “No!” “You can’t ever lose control, Gully. You’ll never be able to drink too much, eat too much, love too much, hate too much… You’ll have to hold yourself with an iron grip.” “No!” he insisted desperately. “It...

The old year soured as pestilence poisoned the planets. The war gained momentum and grew from a distant affair of romantic raids and skirmishes in space to a holocaust in the making. It became evident that the last of the World Wars was done and the first of the Solar Wars had begun. The belligerents slowly massed men and materiel for the havoc. The Outer Satellites introduced universal conscription, and the Inner Planets perforce followed suit. Industries, trades, sciences, skills, and professions were drafted; regulations and oppressions followed. The armies and navies requisitioned and commanded. Commerce obeyed, for this war (like all wars) was the shooting phase of a commercial struggle. But populations rebelled, and draft-jaunting and labor-jaunting became critical problems. Spy scares and invasion scares spread. The hysterical became informers and lynchers. An ominous foreboding paralyzed every home from Baffin Island to the Falklands. The dying year was enlivened only by the advent of the Four Mile Circus.

"This war (like all wars) was the shooting phase of a commercial struggle." is a magnificent line. Trump's lunatic trade war with China is presently escalating similarly.

Foyle examined him keenly and without rancor. “Asthenic type,” he decided. “Slender, long-boned, no strength. Epileptoid character. Self-centered, pedantic, single-minded, shallow. Not bribable; too repressed and straitlaced. But repression’s the chink in his armor.” An hour later six followers from the Four Mile Circus waylaid the record clerk. They were of the female persuasion and richly endowed with vice. Two hours later, the record clerk, dazed by flesh and the devil, delivered up his information.

The man smote the bank notes from Foyle’s hand, leaped up and ran down the beach. Foyle tackled him at the edge of the surf. Forrest fell headlong, his face in the water. Foyle held him there. “Who commanded Vorga, Forrest? Who gave the order?” “You’re drowning him!” Robin cried. “Let him suffer a little. Water’s easier than vacuum. I suffered for six months. Who gave the order, Forrest?” The man bubbled and choked. Foyle lifted his head out of the water. “What are you? Loyal? Crazy? Scared? Your kind would sell out for five thousand. I’m offering fifty. Fifty thousand for information, you son of a bitch, or you die slow and hard.”

Foyle shut the door and turned. Dr. Sergei Orel bowed. The good doctor was crisp and sterile in the classic white cap, gown, and surgical mask of the medical clans, to which he belonged by fraudulent assertion only. He was short, swarthy, and olive-eyed, recognizably Russian by his name alone. More than a century of jaunting had so mingled the many populations of the world that racial types were disappearing.

Since the Middle Ages the Spanish Stairs have been the center of corruption in Rome. Rising from the Piazza di Spagna to the gardens of the Villa Borghese in a broad, long sweep, the Spanish Stairs are, have been, and always will be swarming with vice. Pimps lounge on the stairs, whores, perverts, lesbians, catamites. Insolent and arrogant, they display themselves and jeer at the respectables who sometimes pass. The Spanish Stairs were destroyed in the fission wars of the late twentieth century. They were rebuilt and destroyed again in the war of the World Restoration in the twenty-first century. Once more they were rebuilt and this time covered over with blast-proof crystal, turning the stairs into a stepped Galleria. The dome of the Galleria cut off the view from the death chamber in Keats’s house. No longer would visitors peep through the narrow window and see the last sight that met the dying poet’s eyes. Now they saw the smoky dome of the Spanish Stairs, and through it the distorted figures of corruption below.

“I must know why a question is asked before I answer, signore.” Y’ang-Yeovil smiled greasily. “And I will pay for my caution by cutting the price. Why are you interested in Vorga and Nomad and this shocking abandonment in space? Were you, perhaps, the unfortunate who was so cruelly treated?” “He’s not Italian! His accent’s perfect, but the speech pattern’s all wrong. No Italian would frame sentences like that.” Foyle stiffened in alarm. Y’ang-Yeovil’s eyes, sharpened to detect and deduce from minutiae, caught the change in attitude. He realized at once that he had slipped somehow. He signalled to his crew urgently. A white-hot brawl broke out on the Spanish Stairs. In an instant, Foyle and Robin were caught up in a screaming, struggling mob. The crews of the Intelligence Tong were past masters of this OP-I maneuver, designed to outwit a jaunting world. Their split-second timing could knock any man off balance and strip him for identification. Their success was based on the simple fact that between unexpected assault and defensive response there must always be a recognition lag. Within the space of that lag, the Intelligence Tong guaranteed to prevent any man from saving himself.

She broke away from him and swept across the ballroom floor. At that moment the first bombs fell. They came in like meteor swarms; not so many, but far more deadly. They came in on the morning quadrant, that quarter of the globe in darkness from midnight to dawn. They collided head on with the forward side of the earth in its revolution around the sun. They had been traveling a distance of four hundred million miles. Their excessive speed was matched by the rapidity of the Terran defense computers which traced and intercepted these New Year gifts from the Outer Satellites within the space of microseconds. A multitude of fierce new stars prickled in the sky and vanished; they were bombs detected and detonated five hundred miles above their target. But so narrow was the margin between speed of defense and speed of attack that many got through. They shot through the aurora level, the meteor level, the twilight limit, the stratosphere, and down to earth. The invisible trajectories ended in titanic convulsions. The first atomic explosion which destroyed Newark shook the Presteign mansion with an unbelievable quake. Floors and walls shuddered and the guests were thrown in heaps along with furniture and decorations. Quake followed quake as the random shower descended around New York. They were deafening, numbing, chilling. The sounds, the shocks, the flares of lurid light on the horizon were so enormous, that reason was stripped from humanity, leaving nothing but flayed animals t...

“Then we’re the last left who count. Why don’t you leave me? Be safe. I’ll be killed soon. No one will ever know your pretense turned tail.” “Bitch!” “Ah, you’re angry. What shocking language. It’s the first sign of weakness. Why don’t you exercise your better judgment and carry me off? That would be the second sign.” “Damn you!” He stepped close to her, clenching his fists in rage. She touched his cheek with a cool, quiet hand, but once again there was that electric shock. “No, it’s too late, my dear,” she said quietly. “Here comes a whole cluster of red streaks…down, down, down…directly at us. There’ll be no escaping this. Quick, now! Run! Jaunte! Take me with you. Quick! Quick!” He swept her off the bench. “Bitch! Never!” He held her, found the soft coral mouth and kissed her; bruised her lips with his, waiting for the final blackout. The concussion never came. “Tricked!” he exclaimed. She laughed. He kissed her again and at last forced himself to release her. She gasped for breath, then laughed again, her coral eyes blazing. “It’s over,” she said. “It hasn’t begun yet.” “What d’you mean?” “The war between us.” “Make it a human war,” she said fiercely. “You’re the first not to be deceived by my looks. Oh God! The boredom of the chivalrous knights and their milk-warm passion for the fairy tale princess. But I’m not like that…inside. I’m not. I’m not. Never. Make it a savage war between us. Don’t win me…destroy me!”

“By God!” Foyle exclaimed. “This is the lead. We can’t fail this time. We’ll know what to do. He’ll spill everything…everything.” He grinned at Robin. “We leave for the moon tomorrow night. Book passage. No, there’ll be trouble on account of the attack. Buy a ship. They’ll be unloading them cheap anyway.” “We?” Robin said. “You mean you.” “I mean we,” Foyle answered. “We’re going to the moon. Both of us.” “I’m leaving.” “You’re not leaving. You’re staying with me.” “But you swore you’d—” “Grow up, girl. I had to swear to anything to get this. I need you more than ever now. Not for Vorga. I’ll handle Vorga myself. For something much more important.” He looked at her incredulous face and smiled ruefully. “It’s too bad, girl. If you’d given me this letter two hours ago I’d have kept my word. But it’s too late now. I need a Romance Secretary. I’m in love with Olivia Presteign.” She leaped to her feet in a blaze of fury. “You’re in love with her? Olivia Presteign? In love with that white corpse!” The bitter fury of her telesending was a startling revelation to him. “Ah, now you have lost me. Forever. Now I’ll destroy you!” She disappeared.

“Fourmyle is Foyle. You know that. I know you know.” “But I never—” “No, you never told me. You’re magnificent. Keep faith with me the same way, Jisbella.” “Then how did you find out?” “Foyle slipped.” “How?” “The name.” “Fourmyle of Ceres? He bought the Ceres company.” “But Geoffrey Fourmyle?” “He invented it.” “He thinks he invented it. He remembered it. Geoffrey Fourmyle is the name they use in the megalomania test down in Combined Hospital in Mexico City. I used the Megal Mood on Foyle when I tried to open him up. The name must have stayed buried in his memory. He dredged it up and thought it was original. That tipped me.” “Poor Gully.” Dagenham smiled. “Yes, no matter how we defend ourselves against the outside we’re always licked by something from the inside. There’s no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.”

Foyle accelerated, blurred to the body, picked it up in mid-fall and carried it aft to the starboard stateroom. There were two main staterooms in the yawl, and Foyle had prepared both of them in advance. The starboard room had been stripped and turned into a surgery. Foyle strapped the body on the operating table, opened a case of surgical instruments, and began the delicate operation he had learned by hypno-training that morning…an operation made possible only by his five-to-one acceleration. He cut through skin and fascia, sawed through the rib cage, exposed the heart, dissected it out and connected veins and arteries to the intricate blood pump alongside the table. He started the pump. Twenty seconds, objective time, had elapsed. He placed an oxygen mask over Kempsey’s face and switched on the alternating suction and ructation of the oxygen pump. Foyle decelerated, checked Kempsey’s temperature, shot an anti-shock series into his veins and waited. Blood gurgled through the pump and Kempsey’s body. After five minutes, Foyle removed the oxygen mask. The respiration reflex continued. Kempsey was without a heart, yet alive. Foyle sat down alongside the operating table and waited. The stigmata still showed on his face.

“Lindsey Joyce, Skoptsy Colony, Mars,” he thought as he was thrust back deep into the pneumatic chair. “A Skoptsy… Without senses, without pleasure, without pain. The ultimate in Stoic escape. How am I going to punish him? Torture him? Put him in the port stateroom and make him feel what I felt aboard Nomad? Damnation! It’s as though he’s dead. He is dead. And I’ve got to figure how to beat a dead body and make it feel pain. To come so close to the end and have the door slammed in your face… The damnable frustration of revenge. Revenge is for dreams…never for reality.”

After two centuries of colonization, the air struggle on Mars was still so critical that the V-L Law, the Vegetative-Lynch Law, was still in effect. It was a killing offense to endanger or destroy any plant vital to the transformation of Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere. Even blades of grass were sacred. There was no need to erect KEEP OFF THE GRASS neons. The man who wandered off a path onto a lawn would be instantly shot. The woman who picked a flower would be killed without mercy. Two centuries of sudden death had inspired a reverence for green growing things that almost amounted to a religion.

The ancient Skoptsy sect of White Russia, believing that sex was the root of all evil, practiced an atrocious self-castration to extirpate the root. The modern Skoptsys, believing that sensation was the root of all evil, practiced an even more barbaric custom. Having entered the Skoptsy Colony and paid a fortune for the privilege, the initiates submitted joyously to an operation that severed the sensory nervous system, and lived out their days without sight, sound, speech, smell, taste, or touch. When they first entered the monastery, the initiates were shown elegant ivory cells in which it was intimated they would spend the remainder of their lives in rapt contemplation, lovingly tended. In actuality, the senseless creatures were packed in catacombs where they sat on rough stone slabs and were fed and exercised once a day. For twenty-three out of twenty-four hours they sat alone in the dark, untended, unguarded, unloved.

A fifth of a second after Foyle arrived at the field, the pursuers from the monastery jaunted in. He looked around desperately. He was surrounded by half a regiment of Commandos, all under acceleration, all geared for lethal-action, all his equal or better. The odds were impossible. And then the Outer Satellites altered the odds. Exactly one week after the saturation raid on Terra, they struck at Mars. Again the missiles came down on the midnight to dawn quadrant. Again the heavens twinkled with interceptions and detonations, and the horizon exploded great puffs of light while the ground shook. But this time there was a ghastly variation, for a brilliant nova burst overhead, flooding the nightside of the planet with garish light. A swarm of fission heads had struck Mars’ tiny satellite, Phobos, instantly vaporizing it into a sunlet. The Recognition lag of the Commandos to this appalling attack gave Foyle his opportunity. He accelerated again and burst through them to his yawl.

“Why? For money? You don’t need money.” “No.” “For control…power?” “Not for power.” “Then why?” She took a deep breath, as though this truth was the first truth and was crucifying her. “For hatred… To pay you back, all of you.” “For what?” “For being blind,” she said in a smoldering voice. “For being cheated. For being helpless… They should have killed me when I was born. Do you know what it’s like to be blind…to receive life secondhand? To be dependent, begging, crippled? ‘Bring them down to your level,’ I told my secret life. ‘If you’re blind make them blinder. If you’re helpless, cripple them. Pay them back…all of them.’” “Olivia, you’re insane.” “And you?” “I’m in love with a monster.” “We’re a pair of monsters.” “No!” “No? Not you?” she flared. “What have you been doing but paying the world back, like me? What’s your revenge but settling your own private account with bad luck? Who wouldn’t call you a crazy monster? I tell you, we’re a pair, Gully. We couldn’t help falling in love.”

“And to your property?” Dagenham inquired with a deadly smile. “You and your damned property. All of you and all of your damned property have put us in this hole. The system’s on the edge of total annihilation for the sake of your property. I’m not exaggerating. It will be a shooting war to end all wars if we can’t stop it.” “We can always surrender,” Presteign answered. “No,” Y’ang-Yeovil said. “That’s already been discussed and discarded at HQ. We know the post-victory plans of the Outer Satellites. They involve total exploitation of the Inner Planets. We’re to be gutted and worked until nothing’s left. Surrender would be as disastrous as defeat.”

“Yes, sir, but you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society.” “To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?” “Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.” “Quite mad,” Dagenham muttered. “But fascinating,” Y’ang-Yeovil murmured. “There’s got to be more to life than just living,” Foyle said to the robot. “Then find it for yourself, sir. Don’t ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.” “Why can’t we all move forward together?” “Because you’re all different. You’re not lemmings. Some must lead, and hope that the rest will follow.” “Who leads?” “The men who must…driven men, compelled men.” “Freak men.” “You’re all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks. Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.”