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 knew . . . 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. 'We'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 on to the shoulders of the first freak who comes along grabbing at it. Are we to be scapegoats for the world for ever?'
'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 rot 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 of 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. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come to me and I make you great. Die, damn you, or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you great. I give you the stars. I make you men!'
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 Paraspace and Paratime. 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, planet-less, 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: Aldebaran 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 Aldebaran' 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 back aboard Nomad.
The girl, Moira, found him in his tool locker aboard Nomad, curled into 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 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, prepared to await the awakening. The girl, Moira, ran up the twisting 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.
About the Author
Alfred Bester was born in Manhattan, New York City, on December 18, 1913. His father James owned a shoe store, and was a first-generation American whose parents were both Austrian. Alfred's mother, Belle, was born in Russia and spoke Yiddish as her first language before coming to America as a youth. Alfred was James and Belle's second and final child, and only son. (Their first child, Rita, was born in 1908.) Though his father was of Jewish background, and his mother became a Christian Scientist, Alfred Bester himself wasn't raised within any religious traditions.
Bester attended the University of Pennsylvania where he was a member of the Philomathean Society. He went on to Columbia Law School, but tired of it and dropped out. Bester and Rolly Goulko married in 1936. Rolly Bester had a successful career as a Broadway, radio and television actress before changing careers to become an advertising executive during the 1960s. The Besters remained married for 48 years until her death on January
12, 1984. Bester was very nearly a lifelong New Yorker, although he lived in Europe for a little over a year in the mid-1950s and moved to Pennsylvania with Rolly in the early 1980s. Once settled there, they lived on Geigel Hill Road in Ottsville, Pennsylvania.
When it comes to pop culture, Alfred Bester is something of an unsung hero. He wrote radio scripts, screenplays, and comic books (in which capacity he created the original Green Lantern Oath).
But Bester is best known for his science-fiction novels, and The Stars My Destination may be his finest creation. First published in 1956 (as Tiger! Tiger!), the novel revolves around a hero named Gulliver Foyle, who teleports himself out of a tight spot and creates a great deal of consternation in the process. With its sly potshotting at corporate skullduggery, The Stars My Destination seems utterly contemporary, and has maintained its status as an underground classic for forty years.
Alfred Bester died in 1987 at the age of 74.
Table of Contents
THE STARS MY DESTINATION
Enter the SF Gateway
Contents
Part One
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
Part Two
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
About the Author
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
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