The Stars My Destination ( Tiger! Tiger! )

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

His senses uncrossed in the ivory-and-gold star chamber of Castle Presteign. Sight became sight and he saw the high mirrors and stained glass windows, the gold tooled library with android librarian on library ladder. Sound became sound and he heard the android secretary tapping the manual beadrecorder at the Louis Quinze desk. Taste became taste as he sipped the cognac that the robot bartender handed him.

He knew he was at bay, faced with the decision of his life. He ignored his enemies and examined the perpetual beam carved in the robot face of the bartender, the classic Irish grin.

«Thank you,» Foyle said.

«My pleasure, sir,» the robot replied and awaited its next cue.

«Nice day,» Foyle remarked.

«Always a lovely day somewhere, sir,» the robot beamed. «Awful day,» Foyle said.

«Always a lovely day somewhere, sir,» the robot responded. «Day,» Foyle said.

«Always a lovely day somewhere, sir,» the robot said.

Foyle turned to the others. «That's me,» he said, motioning to the robot.

«That's all of us. We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response . . mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves. So. . .here I am, here I am, waiting to respond. Press the buttons and I'll jump.» He aped the canned voice of the robot. «My pleasure to serve, sir.» Suddenly his tone lashed them. «What do you want?»

They stirred with uneasy purpose. Foyle was burned, beaten, chastened, and yet he was taking control of all of them.

«We'll stipulate the threats,» Foyle said. «I'm to be hung, drawn, and quartered, tortured in hell if I don't . . .What? What do you want?»

«I want my property,» Presteign said, smiling coldly.

«Eighteen and some odd pounds of PyrE. Yes. What do you offer?»

«I make no offer, sir. I demand what is mine.»

Y'ang-Yeovil and Dagenham began to speak. Foyle silenced them. «One button at a time, gentlemen. Presteign is trying to make me jump at present.» He turned to Presteign. «Press harder, blood and money, or find another button. Who are you to make demands at this moment?»

Presteign tightened his lips. «The law. . .» he began.

«What? Threats?» Foyle laughed. «Am I to be frightened into anything? Don't be imbecile. Speak to me the way you did New Year's Eve, Presteign, without mercy, without forgiveness, without hypocrisy.»

Presteign bowed, took a breath, and ceased to smile. «I offer you power,» he said. «Adoption as my heir, partnership in Presteign Enterprises, the chieftainship of clan and sept. Together we can own the world.»

«With PyrE?»

«Yes.»

«Your proposal is noted and declined. Will you offer your daughter?»

«Olivia?» Presteign choked and clenched his fists.

«Yes, Olivia. Where is she?»

«You scum!» Presteign cried. «Filth . . . Common thief . . . You dare to. . .»

«Will you offer your daughter for the PyrE?»

«Yes,» Presteign answered, barely audible.

Foyle turned to Dagenham. «Press your button, death's-head,» he said. «If the discussion's to be conducted on this level. . .» Dagenham snapped. «It is. Without mercy, without forgiveness, without hypocrisy. What do you offer?»

«Glory.»

«We can't offer money or power. We can offer honor. Gully Foyle, the man who saved the Inner Planets from annihilation. We can offer security. We'll wipe out your criminal record, give you an honored name, guarantee a niche in the hail of fame.»

«No,» Jisbella McQueen cut in sharply. «Don't accept. If you want to be a savior, destroy the secret. Don't give PyrE to anyone.»

«What is PyrE?»

«Quiet!» Dagenham snapped.

«It's a thermonuclear explosive that's detonated by thought alone by psychokinesis,» Jisbella said.

«What thought?»

«The desire of anyone to detonate it, directed at it. That brings it to critical mass if it's not insulated by Inert Lead Isotope.»

«I told you to be quiet,» Dageuham growled.

«If we're all to have a chance at him, I want mine.»

«This is bigger than idealism.»

«Nothing's bigger than idealism.»

«Foyle's secret is,» Y'ang-Yeovil murmured. «I know how relatively unimportant PyrE is just now.» He smiled at Foyle. «Sheffield's law assistant overheard part of your little discussion in Old St. Pat's. We know about the space-jaunting.»

There was a sudden hush.

«Space-jaunting,» Dagenham exclaimed. «Impossible. You don't mean it.»

«I do mean it. Foyle's demonstrated that space-jaunting is not impossible. He jaunted six hundred thousand miles from an O.S. raider to the wreck of the 'Nomad.' As I said, this is far bigger than PyrE. I should like to discuss that matter first.»

«Everyone's been telling what they want,» Robin Wednesbury said slowly. «What do you want, Gully Foyle?»

«Thank you,» Foyle answered. «I want to be punished.»

«What?»

«I want to be purged,» he said in a suffocated voice. The stigmata began to appear on his bandaged face. «I want to pay for what I've done and settle the account. I want to get rid of this damnable cross I'm carrying . . . this ache that's cracking my spine. I want to go back to Gouffre Martel. I want a lobo, if I deserve it . . . and I know I do. I want…”

«You want escape,» Dagenham interrupted. «There's no escape.»

«I want release!»

«Out of the question,» Y'ang-Yeovil said. «There's too much of value locked up in your head to be lost by lobotomy.»

«We're beyond easy childish things like crime and punishment,» Dagenham added.

«No,» Robin objected. «There must always be sin and forgiveness. We're never beyond that.»

«Profit and loss, sin and forgiveness, idealism and realism,» Foyle smiled. «You're all so sure, so simple, so single-minded. I'm the only one in doubt. Let's see how sure you really are. You'll give up Olivia, Presteign? To me, yes? Will you give her up to the law? She's a killer.»

Presteign tried to rise, and then fell back in his chair.

«There must be forgiveness, Robin? Will you forgive Olivia Presteign? She murdered your mother and sisters.»

Robin turned ashen. Y'ang-Yeovil tried to protest.

«The Outer Satellites don't have PyrE, Yeovil. Sheffield revealed that. Would you use it on them anyway? Will you turn my name into common anathema . . .like Lynch and Boycott?»

Foyle turned to Jisbella. «Will your idealism take you back to Gouffre Mattel to serve out your sentence? And you, Dagenham, will you give her up? Let her go?»

He listened to the outcries and watched the confusion for a moment, bitter and constrained.

«Life is so simple,» he said. «This decision is so simple, isn't it? Am I to respect Presteign's property rights? The welfare of the planets? Jisbella's ideals? Dagenham's realism? Robin's conscience? Press the button and watch the robot jump. But I'm not a robot. I'm a freak of the universe . . . a thinking animal. . . and I'm trying to see my way clear through this morass. Am I to turn PyrE over to the world and let it destroy itself? Am I to teach the world how to space-jaunte and let us spread our freak show from galaxy to galaxy through all the universe? What's the answer?»

The bartender robot hurled its mixing glass across the room with a resounding crash. In the amazed silence that followed, Dagenham grunted: «Damn! My radiation's disrupted your dolls again, Presteign.»

«The answer is yes,» the robot said, quite distinctly.

«What?» Foyle asked, taken aback.

«The answer to your question is yes.»

«Thank you,» Foyle said.

«My pleasure, sir,» the robot responded. «A man is a member of society first, and an individual second. You must go along with society, whether it chooses destruction or not.»

«Completely haywire,» Dagenham said impatiently. «Switch it off, Presteign.»

«Wait,» Foyle commanded. He looked at the beaming grin engraved in the steel robot face. «But society can be so stupid. So confused. You've witnessed this conference.»

«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.»

«Thank you very much.»

«My pleasure, sir.»

«You've saved the day.»

«Always a lovely day somewhere, sir,» the robot beamed. Then it fizzed, jangled, and collapsed.

Foyle turned on the others. «That thing's right,» he said, «and you're wrong. Who are we, any of us, to make a decision for the world? Let the world make its own decisions. Who are we to keep secrets from the world? Let the world know and decide for itself. Come to Old St. Pat's.»

He jaunted; they followed. The square block was still cordoned and by now an enormous crowd had gathered. So many of the rash and curious were jaunting into the smoking ruins that the police had set up a protective induction field to keep them out. Even so, urchins, curio seekers and irresponsibles attempted to jaunte into the wreckage, only to be burned by the induction field and depart, squawking.

At a signal from Y'ang-Yeovil, the field was turned off. Foyle went through the hot rubble to the east wall of the cathedral which stood to a height of fifteen feet. He felt the smoking stones, pressed, and levered. There came a grinding grumble and a three-by-five-foot section jarred open and then stuck. Foyle gripped it and pulled. The section trembled; then the roasted hinges collapsed and the stone panel crumbled.

Two centuries before, when organized religion had been abolished and orthodox worshippers of all faiths had been driven underground, some devout souls had constructed this secret niche in Old St. Pat's and turned it into an altar. The gold of the crucifix still shone with the brilliance of eternal faith. At the foot of the cross rested a small black box of Inert Lead Isotope.

«Is this a sign?» Foyle panted. «Is this the answer I want?»

He snatched the heavy safe before any could seize it. He jaunted a hundred yards to the remnants of the cathedral steps facing Fifth Avenue. There he opened the safe in full view of the gaping crowds. A shout of consternation went up from the Intelligence crews who knew the truth of its contents.

«Foyle!» Dagenham cried.

«For Cod's sake, Foyle!» Y'ang-Yeovil shouted.

Foyle withdrew a slug of PyrE, the color of iodine crystals, the size of a cigarette. . . one pound of transplutonian isotopes in solid solution.

«PyrE!» he roared to the mob. «Take it! Keep it! It's your future. PyrE!» He hurled the slug into the crowd and roared over his shoulder: «SanFran. Russian Hill stage.»

He jaunted St. Louis-Denver to San Francisco, arriving at the Russian Hill stage where it was four in the afternoon and the streets were bustling with late-shopper jaunters.

«PyrE!» Foyle bellowed. His devil face glowed blood red. He was an appalling sight. «PyrE. It's danger! It's death! It's yours. Make them tell you what it is. Nome!» he called to his pursuit as it arrived, and jaunted.

It was lunch hour in Nome, and the lumberjacks jaunting down from the sawmills for their beefsteak and beer were startled by the tiger-faced man who hurled a one pound slug of iodine colored alloy in their midst and shouted in the gutter tongue: «PyrE! You hear me, man? You listen a me, you. PyrE is filthy death for us. Alla us! Grab no guesses, you. Make 'em tell you about PyrE, is all!»

To Dagenham, Y'ang-Yeovil and others jaunting in after him, as always, seconds too late, he shouted: «Tokyo. Imperial stage!» He disappeared a split second before their shots reached him.

It was nine o'clock of a crisp, winey morning in Tokyo, and the morning rush hour crowd milling around the Imperial stage alongside the carp ponds was paralyzed by a tiger-faced Samurai who appeared and hurled a slug of curious metal and unforgettable warnings and admonitions at them.

Foyle continued to Bangkok where it was pouring rain, and Delhi where a monsoon raged, always pursued in his mad-dog course. In Baghdad it was three in the morning and the night-club crowd and pub crawlers who stayed a perpetual half hour ahead of closing time around the world, cheered him alcoholically. In Paris and again in London it was midnight and the mobs on the Champs Elysées and in Piccadilly Circus were galvanized by Foyle's appearance and passionate exhortation.

Having led his pursuers three-quarters of the way around the world in fifty minutes, Foyle permitted them to overtake him in London. He permitted them to knock him down, take the ILl safe from his arms, count the remaining slugs of PyrE, and slam the safe shut.

«There's enough left for a war. Plenty left for destruction. . . annihilation. . . if you dare.» He was laughing and sobbing in hysterical triumph. «Millions for defense, but not one cent for survival.»

«D'you realize what you've done, you damned killer?» Dagenham shouted.

«I know what I've done.»

«Nine pounds of PyrE scattered around the world! One thought and we'll…How can we get it back without telling them the truth? For God's sake, Yeo, keep that crowd back. Don't let them hear this.»

«Impossible.»

«Then let's jaunte.»

«No,» Foyle roared. «Let them hear this. Let them hear everything.»

«You're insane, man. You've handed a loaded gun to children.»

«Stop treating them like children and they'll stop behaving like children. Who the hell are you to play monitor?»

«What are you talking about?»

«Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open.» Foyle laughed savagely. «I've ended the last starchamber conference in the world. I've blown the last secret wide open. No more secrets from now on. . . . No more telling the children what's best for them to know. Let 'em all grow up. It's about time.»

«Christ, he is insane.»

«Am I? I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and dying. The common man's been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us. . . . Compulsive men . . . Tiger men who can't help lashing the world before them. We're all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we're compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?»

«We're not saddled,» Y'ang-Yeovil said quietly. «WTe're driven. We're forced to seize the responsibility that the average man shirks.»

«Then let him stop shirking it. Let him stop tossing his duty and guilt onto the shoulders of the first freak who comes along grabbing at it. Are we to be scapegoats for the world forever?»

«Damn you!» Dagenham raged. «Don't you realize that you can't trust people? They don't know enough for their own good.»

«Then let them learn or die. We're all in this together. Let's live together or die together.»

«D'you want to die in their ignorance? You've got to figure out how we can get those slugs back without blowing everything wide open.»

«No. I believe in them. I was one of them before I turned tiger. They can all turn uncommon if they're kicked awake like I was.»

Foyle shook himself and abruptly jaunted to the bronze head of Eros, fifty feet above the counter of Piccadilly Circus. He perched precariously and bawled: «Listen a me, all you! Listen, man! Gonna sermonize, me. Dig this, you!»

He was answered with a roar.

«You pigs, you. You goof like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies.

Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you . . .»

He was jeered. He continued with the hysterical passion of the possessed. «Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Bow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.»

He disappeared.

He jaunted up the geodesic lines of space-time to an Elsewhere and an Elsewhen. He arrived in chaos. He hung in a precarious para-Now for a moment and then tumbled back into chaos.

«It can be done,» he thought. «It must be done.»

He jaunted again, a burning spear flung from unknown into unknown, and again he tumbled back into a chaos of para-space and para-time. He was lost in Nowhere.

«I believe,» he thought. «I have faith.»

He jaunted again and failed again.

«Faith in what?» he asked himself, adrift in limbo.

«Faith in faith,» he answered himself. «It isn't necessary to have something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that somewhere there's something worthy of belief.»

He jaunted for the last time and the power of his willingness to believe transformed the para-Now of his random destination into a real…

NOW: Rigel in Orion, burning blue-white, five hundred and forty light years from earth, ten thousand times more luminous than the sun, a cauldron of energy circled by thirty-seven massive planets . . . Foyle hung, freezing and suffocating in space, face to face with the incredible destiny in which he believed, but which was still inconceivable. He hung in space for a blinding moment, as helpless, as amazed, and yet as inevitable as the first gilled creature to come out of the sea and hang gulping on a primeval beach in the dawn-history of life on earth.

He space-jaunted, turning para-Now into .

NOW: Vega in Lyra, an AO star twenty-six light years from earth, burning bluer than Rigel, planetless, but encircled by swarms of blazing comets whose gaseous tails scintillated across the blue-black firmament .

And again he turned now into NOW: Canopus, yellow as the sun, gigantic, thunderous in the silent wastes of space at last invaded by a creature that once was gilled. The creature hung, gulping on the beach of the universe, nearer death than life, nearer the future than the past, ten leagues beyond the wide world's end. It wondered at the masses of dust, meteors, and motes that girdled Canopus in a broad, flat ring like the rings of Saturn and of the breadth of Saturn's orbit . .

NOW: Aldeberan in Taurus, a monstrous red star of a pair of stars whose sixteen planets wove high velocity ellipses around their gyrating parents. He was hurling himself through space-time with growing assurance.

NOW: Antares, an Mi red giant, paired like Aldeberan, two hundred and fifty light years from earth, encircled by two hundred and fifty planetoids of the size of Mercury, of the climate of Eden.

And lastly. . . NOW.

He was drawn to the womb of his birth. He returned to the «Nomad,» now welded into the mass of the Sargasso asteroid, home of the lost Scientific People who scavenged the spaceways between Mars and Jupiter . . . home of Joseph who had tattooed Foyle's tiger face and mated him to the girl, Moira.

He was back aboard «Nomad.»

Gully Foyle is my name

And TeTra is my nation.

Deep space is my dwelling place,

The stars my destination.

The girl, Moira, found him in his tool locker aboard «Nomad,» curled in a tight fetal ball, his face hollow, his eyes burning with divine revelation. Although the asteroid had long since been repaired and made airtight, Foyle still went through the motions of the perilous existence that had given birth to him years before.

But now he slept and meditated, digesting and encompassing the magnificence he had learned. He awoke from reverie to trance and drifted out of the locker, passing Moira with blind eyes, brushing past the awed girl who stepped aside and sank to her knees. He wandered through the empty passages and returned to the womb of the locker. He curled up again and was lost.

She touched him once; he made no move. She spoke the name that had been emblazoned on his face. He made no answer. She turned and fled to the interior of the asteroid, to the holy of holies in which Joseph reigned.

«My husband has returned to us,» Moira said.

«Your husband?»

«The god-man who almost destroyed us.» Joseph's face darkened with anger.

«Where is he? Show me!» «You will not hurt him?»

«All debts must be paid. Show me.»

Joseph followed her to the locker aboard «Nomad» and gazed intently at Foyle. The anger in his face was replaced by wonder. He touched Foyle and spoke to him; there was still no response.

«You cannot punish him,» Moira said. «He is dying.»

«No,» Joseph answered quietly. «He is dreaming. I, a priest, know these dreams. Presently he will awaken and read to us, his people, his thoughts.»

«And then you will punish him.»

«He has found it already in himself,» Joseph said.

He settled down outside the locker. The girl, Moira, ran up the twisted corridors and returned a few moments later with a silver basin of warm water and a silver tray of food. She bathed Foyle gently and then set the tray before him as an offering. Then she settled down alongside Joseph . . . alongside the world . . . prepared to await the awakening.