American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (24 page)

Foyle darted back to his locker and replenished his spacesuit again. He began to weep. He started to gather his possessions— a faceless clock which he kept wound just to listen to the ticking, a lug wrench with a hand-shaped handle which he would hold in lonely moments, an egg slicer upon whose wires he would pluck primitive tunes. . . . He dropped them in his excitement, hunted for them in the dark, then began to laugh at himself.

He filled his spacesuit with air once more and capered back to the bridge. He punched a flare button labelled: RESCUE. From the hull of the “Nomad” shot a sunlet that burst and hung, flooding miles of space with harsh white light.

“Come on, baby you,” Foyle crooned. “Hurry up, man. Come on, baby baby you.”

Like a ghost torpedo, the stranger slid into the outermost rim of light, approaching slowly, looking him over. For a moment Foyle’s heart constricted; the ship was behaving so cautiously that he feared she was an enemy vessel from the Outer Satellites. Then he saw the famous red and blue emblem on her side, the trademark of the mighty industrial clan of Presteign; Presteign of Terra, powerful, munificent, beneficent. And he knew this was a sister ship, for the “Nomad” was also Presteign-owned. He knew this was an angel from space hovering over him.

“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’ . . . ‘VorgaT: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 did what the cipher could not do; he rescued himself.

For two days he combed the wreckage in five-minute forays, and devised a harness for his shoulders. He attached an air tank to the harness and connected the tank to his spacesuit helmet with an improvised hose. He wriggled through space like an ant dragging a log, but he had the freedom of the "Nomad" for all time.

He thought.

In the control bridge he taught himself to use the few navigation instruments that were still unbroken, studying the standard manuals that littered the wrecked navigation room. In the ten years of his service in space he had never dreamed of attempting such a thing, despite the rewards of promotion and pay; but now he had "Vorga-T: 1339" to reward him.

He took sights. The Nomad was drifting in space on the ecliptic, three hundred million miles from the sun. Before him were spread the constellations Perseus, Andromeda and Pisces. Hanging almost in the foreground was a dusty orange spot that was Jupiter, distinctly a planetary disc to the naked eye. With any luck he could make a course for Jupiter and rescue.

Jupiter was not, could never be habitable. Like all the outer planets beyond the asteroid orbits, it was a frozen mass of methane and ammonia; but its four largest satellites swarmed with cities and populations now at war with the Inner Planets. He would be a war prisoner, but he had to stay alive to settle accounts with "Vorga-T: 1339". Foyle inspected the engine-room of the "Nomad". There was Hi-Thrust fuel remaining in the tanks and one of the four tail jets was still in operative condition. Foyle found the engine-room manuals and studied them. He repaired the connection between fuel tanks and the one jet chamber. The tanks were on the sunside of the wreck and warmed above freezing point. The Hi-Thrust was still liquid, but it would not flow. In freefall there was no gravity to draw the fuel down the pipes.

Foyle studied a space manual and learned something about theoretical gravity. If he could put the Nomad into a spin, centrifugal force would impart enough navigation to the ship to draw fuel down into the combustion chamber of the jet. If he could fire the combustion chamber, the unequal thrust of the one jet would impart a spin to the Nomad.

But he couldn't fire the jet without first having the spin; and he couldn't get the spin without first firing the jet.

He thought his way out of the deadlock; he was inspired by Vorga.

Foyle opened the drainage petcock in the combustion chamber of the jet and tortuously filled the chamber with fuel by hand. He had primed the pump. Now, if he ignited the fuel, it would fire long enough to impart the spin and start gravity. Then the flow from the tanks would commence and the rocketing would continue.

He tried matches.

Matches will not burn in the vacuum of space.

He tried flint and steel.

Sparks will not glow in the absolute zero of space.

He thought of red-hot filaments.

He had no electric power of any description aboard the Nomad to make a filament red-hot.

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".

Foyle brought ice from the frozen galley tanks, melted it and added water to the jet combustion chamber. The fuel and the water were non-miscible, they did not mix. The water floated in a thin layer over the fuel.

From the chemical stores Foyle brought a silvery bit of wire, pure sodium metal. He poked the wire through the open petcock. The sodium ignited when it touched the water and flared with high heat. The heat touched off the Hi-Thrust which burst in a needle flame from the petcock. Foyle closed the petcock with a wrench. The ignition held in the chamber and the lone aft jet slammed out flame with a soundless vibration that shook the ship.

'The off-centre thrust of the jet twisted the "Nomad" into a slow spin. The torque imparted a slight gravity. Weight returned. The floating debris that cluttered the hull fell to decks, walls and ceilings; and the gravity kept the fuel feeding from tanks to combustion chamber.

Foyle wasted no time on cheers. He left the engine room and struggled forward in desperate haste for a final, fatal observation from the control bridge. This would tell him whether the Nomad was committed to a wild plunge out into the no-return of deep space, or a course for Jupiter and rescue.

The slight gravity made his air tank almost impossible to drag. The sudden forward surge of acceleration shook loose masses of debris which flew backward through the "Nomad". As Foyle struggled up the companionway stairs to control-deck, the rubble from the bridge came hurtling back down the corridor and smashed into him. He was caught up in this tumbleweed in space, rolled back the length of the empty corridor and brought up against the galley bulkhead with an impact that shattered his last hold on consciousness. He lay pinned in the centre of half a ton of wreckage, helpless, barely alive, but still raging for vengeance.

'Who are you?'

'Where are you from?'

'Where are you now?'

'Where are you bound?'

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.

S.S. “Nomad” looped through space, neither on a course for Jupiter nor the far stars, but drifting across the asteroid belt in the slow spiral of a dying animalcule. It passed within a mile of the Sargasso Asteroid, and it was immediately captured by The Scientific People to be incorporated into their little planet. They found Foyle.

He awoke once while he was being carried in triumph on a litter through the natural and artificial passages within the scavenger asteroid. They were constructed of meteor metal, stone, and hull plates. Some of the plates still bore names long forgotten in the history of space travel: INDUS QUEEN, TERRA; SYRTUS RAMBLER, MARS; THREE RING CIRCUS, SATURN. The passages led to great halls, storerooms, apartments, and homes, all built of salvaged ships cemented into the asteroid.

In rapid succession Foyle was borne through an ancient Ganymede scow, a Lassell ice borer, a captain’s barge, a Callisto heavy cruiser, a twenty-second-century fuel transport with glass tanks still filled with smoky rocket fuel. Two centuries of salvage were gathered in this hive: armories of weapons, libraries of books, museums of costumes, warehouses of machinery, tools, rations, drink, chemicals, synthetics, and surrogates.

A crowd around the litter was howling triumphantly. “Quant Suff !” they shouted. A woman’s chorus began an excited bleating:

Ammonium bromide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . gr. 1 ½ 

Potassium bromide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . gr. 3

Sodium bromide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . gr. 2

Citric acid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . quant. suff.

“Quant Suff !” The Scientific People roared. “Quant Suff !” Foyle fainted.

He awoke again. He had been taken out of his spacesuit. He was in the greenhouse of the asteroid where plants were grown for fresh oxygen. The hundred-yard hull of an old ore carrier formed the room, and one wall had been entirely fitted with salvaged windows . . . round ports, square ports, diamond, hexagonal . . . every shape and age of port had been introduced until the vast wall was a crazy quilt of glass and light.

The distant sun blazed through; the air was hot and moist. Foyle gazed around dimly. A devil face peered at him. Cheeks, chin, nose, and eyelids were hideously tattooed like an ancient Maori mask. Across the brow was tattooed JÓSEPH. The “O” in JÓSEPH had a tiny arrow thrust up from the right shoulder, turning it into the symbol of Mars, used by scientists to designate male sex.

“We are the Scientific Race,” Jóseph said. “I am Jóseph; these are my people.”

He gestured. Foyle gazed at the grinning crowd surrounding his litter. All faces were tattooed into devil masks; all brows had names blazoned across them.

“How long did you drift?” Jóseph asked.

“Vorga,” Foyle mumbled.

“You are the first to arrive alive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Very. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of Holy Darwin. Most scientific.”

“Quant Suff !” the crowd bellowed.

Jóseph seized Foyle’s elbow in the manner of a physician taking a pulse. His devil mouth counted solemnly up to ninetyeight.

“Your pulse. Ninety-eight-point-six,” Jóseph said, producing a thermometer and shaking it reverently. “Most scientific.”

“Quant Suff !” came the chorus.

Jóseph proffered an Erlenmeyer flask. It was labeled:
Lung, Cat, c.s., hematoxylin & eosin
. “Vitamin?” Jóseph inquired.

When Foyle did not respond, Jóseph removed a large pill from the flask, placed it in the bowl of a pipe, and lit it. He puffed once and then gestured. Three girls appeared before Foyle. Their faces were hideously tattooed. Across each brow was a name: JỌAN and MỌIRA and PỌLLY. The “O” of each name had a tiny cross at the base.

“Choose,” Jóseph said. “The Scientific People practice Natural Selection. Be scientific in your choice. Be genetic.”

As Foyle fainted again, his arm slid off the litter and glanced against MỌira.

“Quant Suff !”

He was in a circular hall with a domed roof. The hall was filled with rusting antique apparatus: a centrifuge, an operating table, a wrecked fluoroscope, autoclaves, cases of corroded surgical instruments.

They strapped Foyle down on the operating table while he raved and rambled. They fed him. They shaved and bathed him. Two men began turning the ancient centrifuge by hand. It emitted a rhythmic clanking like the pounding of a war drum. Those assembled began tramping and chanting.

They turned on the ancient autoclave. It boiled and geysered, filling the hall with howling steam. They turned on the old fluoroscope. It was short-circuited and spat sizzling bolts of lightning across the steaming hall.

A ten foot figure loomed up to the table. It was Jóseph on stilts. He wore a surgical cap, a surgical mask, and a surgeon’s gown that hung from his shoulders to the floor. The gown was heavily embroidered with red and black thread illustrating anatomical sections of the body. Jóseph was a lurid tapestry out of a surgical text.

“I pronounce you Nomad!” Jóseph intoned.

The uproar became deafening. Jóseph tilted a rusty can over Foyle’s body. There was the reek of ether.

Foyle lost his tatters of consciousness and darkness enveloped him. Out of the darkness “Vorga-T:1339” surged again and again, accelerating on a sunward course that burst through Foyle’s blood and brains until he could not stop screaming silently for vengeance.