American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (51 page)

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 God’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 into 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 Élysées 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 ILI 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 star-chamber 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. “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 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. Blow 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 paraspace 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: 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 spacetime with growing assurance . . .

NOW: Antares, an M1 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 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 Jóseph who had tattooed Foyle’s tiger face and mated him to the girl, MỌira.

He was back aboard “Nomad.”

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation.

Deep space is my dwelling place,

The stars my destination.

The girl, MỌira, found him in his tool locker aboard “Nomad,” curled in a tight foetal 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 MỌira 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 Jóseph reigned.

“My husband has returned to us,” MỌira said.

“Your husband?”

“The god-man who almost destroyed us.”

Jóseph’s face darkened with anger.

“Where is he? Show me!”

“You will not hurt him?”

“All debts must be paid. Show me.”

Jóseph 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,” MỌira said. “He is dying.” 

“No,” Jóseph 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,” Jóseph said.

He settled down outside the locker. The girl, MỌira, 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 Jóseph . . . alongside the world . . . prepared to await the awakening.

James Blish

I schal declare the disposcioun of rome fro hys first makyng . . . and the seconde part schal declar ye holynesse of ye same place fro his first crystendom; I schal not write but that I fynde in auctores or ellis that I sey with eye.

—
John Capgrave:
The Solace of Pilgrims to LARRY SHAW

For any reader who cares, the Lithian words and names he will encounter here and there in this story are to be pronounced as follows:

Xoredeshch
—“X” as English “K” or Greek chi, hard; “shch” contains two separate sounds, as in Russian, or in English “fi
sh
-
ch
urch.”

Sfath
: As in English, with a broad “a.”
Gton
: Guttural “G,” against the hard palate, like hawking.
Chtexa
: Like German “Stuka,” but with the flat “e.”
gchteht
: Guttural “g” followed by the soft “sh” sound, a flat

“e,” and the “h” serving as equivalent of the Old Russian mute sign; thus, a four-syllable word, with a palatal tick at the end, but sounded as one syllable.

Gleshchtehk
—As indicated, with the guttural “G,” the “fi
sh
-
ch
urch” middle consonants, and the mute “h” throwing the “k” back against the soft palate.

The rule is that “ch” is always English “sh” in the initial position, always English “ch” as in “chip” elsewhere in the word; and “h” in isolation is an accented rest which always
precedes
, never follows, a consonant. As Agronski somewhere remarks, anybody who can spit can speak Lithian.

The stone door slammed. It was Cleaver’s trade-mark: there had never been a door too heavy, complex, or cleverly tracked to prevent him from closing it with a sound like a clap of doom. And no planet in the universe could possess an air sufficiently thick and curtained with damp to muffle that sound— not even Lithia.

Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, late of Peru, and always Clerk Regular of the Society of Jesus, professed father of the four vows, continued to read. It would take Paul Cleaver’s impatient fingers quite a while to free him from his jungle suit, and in the meantime the problem remained. It was a century-old problem, first propounded in 1939, but the Church had never cracked it. And it was diabolically complex (that adverb was official, precisely chosen, and intended to be taken literally.) Even the novel which had proposed the case was on the Index Expurgatorius, and Father Ruiz-Sanchez had spiritual access to it only by virtue of his Order.