The Stars My Destination

by Alfred Bester

  As an Intelligence Officer, Y'ang-Yeovil was prepared to deal with this crisis. 'Not a cook, madam. I haven't had time to change back to my usual fascinating self. Please sit here, Miss . . . ?'

  'Wednesbury. Robin Wednesbury-'

  'Charmed. I'm Captain Y'ang-Yeovil. How nice of you to come and see me, Miss Wednesbury. You've saved me a long, hard search.'

  'B-But I don't understand. What were you doing on the Spanish Stairs? Why were you hunting -?'

  Y'ang-Yeovil saw that her lips weren't moving. 'Ah? You're a telepath, Miss Wednesbury? How is that possible?. I thought I knew every telepath in the system.'

  'I'm not a full telepath. I'm a telesend. I can only send... not receive.'

  'Which, of course, makes you worthless to the world. I see.'

  Y'ang-Yeovil cocked a sympathetic eye at her. 'What a dirty trick, Miss Wednesbury, to be saddled with all the disadvantages of telepathy, and be deprived of all the advantages. I do sympathize. Believe me.'

  'Bless him. He's the first ever to realize that without being told.'

  'Careful, Miss Wednesbury, I'm receiving you. Now, about the Spanish Stairs?'

  He paused, listening intently to her agitated telesending: 'Why was he hunting? Me? Alien Bellig - Oh God! Will they hurt me? Cut and - Information. I-'

  'My dear girl,' Y'ang-Yeovil said gently. He took her hands and held them sympathetically. 'Listen to me a moment. You're alarmed over nothing. Apparently you're an Alien Belligerent. Yes?'

  She nodded.

  'That's unfortunate, but we won't worry about it now. About Intelligence cutting and slicing information out of people . . . that's all propaganda.'

  'Propaganda?'

  'We're not maladroits, Miss Wednesbury. We know how to extract information without being medieval. But we spread the legend to soften people up in advance, so to speak.'

  'Is that true? He's lying. It's a trick.'

  'It's true, Miss Wednesbury. I do finesse, but there's no need now. Not when you've evidently come of your own free will to offer information.'

  'He's too adroit... too quick . . . He-'

  'You sound as though you've been badly tricked recently, Miss Wednesbury... Badly burned.'

  'I have. God, I have. By myself, mostly. I'm a fool. A hateful fool!'

  'Never a fool, Miss Wednesbury, and never hateful. I don't know what's happened to shatter your opinion of yourself, but I hope to restore it. So . . . you've been deceived, have you? By yourself, mostly? We all do that. But you've been helped by someone. Who?'

  'I'm betraying him.'

  'Then don't tell me.'

  'But I've got to find my mother and sisters . . . I can't trust him any more . . . I've got to do it myself.'

  Robin took a deep breath. 'I want to tell you about a man named Gulliver Foyle.'

  Y'ang-Yeovil at once got down to business.

  'Is it true he arrived by railroad?' Olivia Presteign asked. 'In a locomotive and observation car? What wonderful audacity.'

  'Yes, he's a remarkable young man,' Presteign answered. He stood, iron-grey and iron-hard, in the reception hall of his home, alone with his daughter. He was guarding honor and life while he waited for servants and staff to return from their panic-stricken jaunte to safety. He chatted imperturbably with Olivia, never once permitting her to realize their grave danger.

  'Father, I'm exhausted.'

  'It's been a trying night, my dear. But please don't retire'

  'Why not?'

  Presteign refrained from telling her that she would be safer with him. 'I'm lonely, Olivia. We'll talk for a few minutes.'

  'I did a daring thing, Father. I watched the attack from the garden.'

  'My dear! Alone?'

  'No. With Fourmyle.'

  A heavy pounding began to shake the front door, which Presteign had closed.

  'What's that?'

  'Looters,' Presteign answered calmly. 'Don't be alarmed, Olivia. They won't get in.'

  He stepped to a table on which he had laid out an assortment of weapons as neatly as a game of patience. 'There's no danger, my love.'

  He tried to distract her. 'You were telling me about Fourmyle. . .

  'Oh, yes. We watched together . . . describing the bombing to each other.'

  'Un-chaperoned? That wasn't discreet, Olivia.'

  'I know. I behaved disgracefully. He seemed so big, so sure of himself, that I gave him the Lady Hauteur treatment. You remember Miss Post, my governess, who was so dignified and aloof that I called her Lady Hauteur? I acted like Miss Post. He was furious, father. That's why he came looking for me in the garden.'

  'And you permitted him to remain? I'm shocked, dear.'

  'I am too. I think I was half out of my mind with excitement. What's he like, father? Tell me. What's he look like to you?'

  'He is big. Tall, very dark, rather enigmatic. Like a Borgia. He seems to alternate between assurance and savagery.'

  'Ali, he is savage, then? I could see it myself. He glows with danger. Most people just shimmer . . . he looks like a lightning bolt. It's terribly fascinating.'

  'My dear,' Presteign remonstrated gently. 'Unmarried females are too modest to talk like that. It would displease me, my love, if you were to form a romantic attachment for a parvenu like Fourmyle of Ceres.'

  The Presteign staff jaunted into the reception hall, cooks, waitresses, footmen, pages, coachmen, valets, maids. All were shaken and hang-dog after their flight from death.

  'You have deserted your posts. It will be remembered,' Presteign said coldly. 'My safety and honor are again in your hands. Guard them. Lady Olivia and I will retire.'

  He took his daughter's arm and led her up the stairs, savagely protective of his ice-pure princess. 'Blood and money,' Presteign murmured.

  'What, father?'

  'I was thinking of a family vice, Olivia. I was thanking the Deity that you have not inherited it'

  'What vice is that?

  'There's no need for you to know.

  'It's one that Fourmyle shares.'

  'Ah, he's wicked? I knew it. Like a Borgia, you said. A wicked Borgia with black eyes and lines in his face. That must account for the pattern.'

  'Pattern, my dear?'

  'Yes. I can see a strange pattern over his face . . . not the usual electricity of nerve and muscle. Something laid over that. It fascinated me from the beginning.'

  'What sort of pattern do you mean?'

  'Fantastic . . . Wonderfully evil. I can't describe it. Give me something to write with. I'll show you.'

  They stopped before a Chippendale cabinet. Presteign took out a silver-mounted slab of crystal and handed it to Olivia. She touched it with her fingertip; a black dot appeared. She moved her finger and the dot elongated into a line. With quick strokes she sketched the hideous swirls and blazons of a devilmask.

  Saul Dagenham left the darkened bedroom. A moment later it was flooded with light as one wall illuminated. It seemed as though a giant mirror reflected Jisbella's bedroom, but with one odd quirk. Jisbella lay in the bed alone, but in the reflection Saul Dagenham sat on the edge of the bed alone. The mirror was, in fact, a sheet of lead glass separating identical rooms. Dagenham had just illuminated his.

  'Love by the Clock,' Dagenham's voice came through a speaker. 'Disgusting.'

  'No, Saul. Never.'

  'Frustrating.'

  'Not that, either.'

  'But unhappy.'

  'No. You're greedy. Be content with what you've got.'

  'God knows, it's more than I ever had. You're magnificent.'

  'You're extravagant. Now go to sleep, darling. We're skiing tomorrow.'

  'No, there's been a change of plan. I've got to work.'

  'Oh, Saul . . . you promised me. No more working and fretting and running. Aren't you going to keep your promise?'

  'I can't with a war on.'

  'To hell with the war. You sacrificed enough up at Tycho Sands. They can't ask any more of you.'

  'I've got one job to fin
ish.'

  'I'll help you finish it.'

  'No. You'd best keep out of this, Jisbella.'

  'You don't trust me.'

  'I don't want you hurt.'

  'Nothing can hurt us.'

  'Foyle can.'

  'W-What?'

  '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.'

  'What are you going to do, Saul?'

  'Do? Finish him, of course.'

  'For twenty pounds of PyrE?'

  'No: To win a lost war.'

  'What?' Jisbella came to the glass wall separating the rooms. 'You, Saul? Patriotic?'

  He nodded, almost guiltily, 'It's ridiculous. Grotesque. But I am. 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.

  Mare Nubium was ideally suited to the growth of anaerobic bacteria, soil organisms, phage, rare moulds and all those microscopic life forms, essential to medicine and industry, which required airless culture. Bacteria, Inc., was a huge mosaic of culture fields traversed by catwalks spread around a central clump of barracks, offices and plant. Each field was a giant glass vat, one hundred feet in diameter, twelve inches high and no more than two molecules thick.

  A day before the sunrise line, creeping across the face of the moon, reached Mare Nubium, the vats were filled with culture medium. At sunrise, abrupt and blinding on the airless moon, the vats were seeded, and for the next fourteen days of continuous sun they were tended, shielded, regulated, nurtured . . . the field-workers trudging up and down the catwalks in spacesuits. As the sunset line crept towards Mare Nubium, the vats were harvested and then left to freeze and sterilize in the two-week frost of the lunar night.

  Jaunting was of no use in this tedious step-by-step cultivation. Hence Bacteria, Inc., hired unfortunates incapable of jaunting and paid them slave wages. This was the lowest form of labor, the dregs and scum of the Solar system; and the barracks of Bacteria, Inc., resembled an Inferno during the two-week lay-off period. Foyle discovered this when he entered Barrack 3.

  He was met by an appalling spectacle. There were two hundred men in the giant room; there were whores and their hard-eyed pimps, professional gamblers and their portable tables, dope-peddlers, money-lenders. There was a haze of acrid smoke and the stench of alcohol and Analogue. Furniture, bedding, clothes, unconscious bodies, empty bottles, rotting food were scattered on the floor. It was all Hogarth.

  A roar challenged Foyle's appearance, but he was equipped to handle this situation. He spoke to the first hairy face thrust into his.

  'Kempsey?' he asked quietly. He was answered outrageously. Nevertheless he grinned and handed the man a Cr 100 note.

  'Kempsey?' he asked another. He was insulted. He paid again and continued his saunter down the barracks distributing Cr 100 notes in calm thanks for insult and invective. In the centre of the barracks he found his key man, the obvious barracks bully, a monster of a man, naked, hairless, fondling two bawds and being fed whisky by sycophants.

  'Kempsey?' Foyle asked in the old gutter tongue. 'I'm diggin' Rodger Kempsey.'

  'I'm diggin' for you broke,'- the man answered, thrusting out a huge paw for Foyle's money. 'Gimmie.'

  There was a delighted howl from the crowd. Foyle smiled and spat in his eye. There was an abject hush. The hairless man dumped the bawds and surged up to annihilate Foyle. Five seconds later he was groveling on the floor with Foyle's foot planted on his neck.

  'Still diggin' Kempsey,' Foyle said gently. 'Diggin' hard, man. You better finger him, man, or you're gone, is all.'

  'Washroom!' the hairless man howled. 'Holed up. Washroom.

  'Now you broke me,' Foyle said. He dumped the rest of his money on the floor before the hairless man and walked quickly to the washroom.

  Kempsey was cowering in the corner of a shower, face pressed to the wall, moaning in a dull rhythm that showed he had been at it for hours.

  'Kempsey?' The moaning answered him.

  'What's a matter, you?'

  'Clothes,' Kempsey wept. 'Clothes. All over, clothes. Like filth, like sick, like dirt. Clothes. All over, clothes.'

  'Up, man. Get up.'

  'Clothes. All over, clothes. Like filth, like sick, like dirt . . . .'

  'Kempsey, mind me, man. Orel sent me.'

  Kempsey stopped weeping and turned his sodden countenance to Foyle. 'Who? Who?'

  'Sergei Orel sent me. I've brought your release. You're free. We'll blow.'

  'When?'

  "Now.'

  'Oh God! God bless him. Bless him!'

  Kempsey began to caper in weary exultation. The bruised and bloated face split into a facsimile of laughter. He laughed and capered and Foyle led him out of the washroom. But in the barracks he screamed and wept again, and as Foyle led him down the long room, the naked bawds swept up armfuls of dirty clothes and shook them before his eyes. Kempsey foamed and gibbered.

  'What's a matter, him?'

  Foyle inquired of the hairless man in the gutter patois.

  The hairless man was now a respectful neutral if not a friend. 'Guesses for grabs,' he answered. 'Always like that, him. Show old clothes and he twitch. Man!'

  'For why, already?'

  'For why? Crazy, is all.'

  At the main-office airlock Foyle got Kempsey and himself corked in suits and then led him out to the rocket field where a score of anti-grav beams pointed their pale fingers upward from pits to the gibbous earth hanging in the night sky. They entered a pit, entered Foyle's yawl and uncorked. Foyle took a bottle and a sting-ampoule from a cabinet. He poured a drink and handed it to Kempsey. He hefted the ampoule in his palm, smiling.

  Kempsey drank the whisky, still dazed, still exulting. 'Free,' he muttered. 'God bless him! Free. Christ, what I've been through.'

  He drank again. 'I still can't believe it. It's like a dream. Why don't you take off, man? I -'

  Kempsey choked and dropped the glass, staring at Foyle in horror. 'Your face!' he exclaimed. 'My God, your face! What happened to it?'

  'You happened to it, you son of a bitch!' Foyle cried. He leaped up, his tiger-face burning, and flung the ampoule like a knife. It pierced Kempsey's neck and hung quivering. Kempsey toppled.

  Foyle accelerated, blurred to the body, picked it up in midfall 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.

  Kempsey remained unconscious.

  Foyle waited.

  Kempsey awoke, screaming.

  Foyle leaped up, tightened the straps and leaned over the heartless man.

  'Hallo, Kempsey,' he said.

  Kempsey screamed.

  'Look at yourself, Kempsey. You're dead.'

  Kempsey fainted. Foyle brought him to with the oxygen mask.

  'Let me die, for God's sake!'

  'What's the matter? Does it hurt? I died for six months, and I didn't whine.'

  'Let me die.'

  'In time. In time, if you behave. You were aboard Vorga on September 16th, 2336?'

  'For Christ's sake, let me die.'

  'You were aboard Vorga?'

  'Yes.'

  'You passed a wreck out in space. Wreck of the Nomad. She signaled for help and you passed her by. Yes?'

  'Yes.'

  'Why?'

  'Christ! Oh Christ help me!'

  'Why?'

  'Oh Jesus!'

  'I was aboard Nomad, Kempsey. Why did you leave me to rot?'

  'Sweet Jesus help me! Christ, deliver me!'

  'I'll deliver you, Kempsey, if you answer questions. Why did you leave me to rot?'

  'Couldn't pick you up.'

  'Why not?'

  'Reffs aboard.'

  'Oh! I guessed right, then. You were running refugees in from Callisto?'

  'Yes.'

  'How many?'

  'Six hundred.'

  'That's a lot, but you could have made room for one more. Why didn't you pick me up?'

  'We were scuttling the reffs.'

  'What!'

  Foyle cried: 'Overboard . . . all of them . . . six hundred . . . Stripped 'em . . . took their clothes, money, jewels, baggage . . . Put 'em through the airlock in batches. Christ! The clothes all over the ship . . . The shrieking and the - Jesus! If I could only forget! The naked women . . . blue . . . busting wide open . . . spinning behind us . . . The clothes all over the ship . . . Six hundred . . . Scuttled!'