Tiger! Tiger! (18 page)

A hairy head thrust out of a tent. `You stoodied for dis sbeech last night, Fourmyle?'

`Damn right. For two hours I stoodied. Never took my head out of the hypno-oven, Kleinmann on Prestidigitation.'

`No, no, no!' the hairy man bawled. `How many times must I tell you? Prestidigitation is not sbeech-making. Is magic. Dumbkopf! ! You haff the wrong hypnosis taken!'

The scarlet underwear began melting. Fourmyle toppled from the shoulders of his shaking valets and disappeared within his tent. There was a roar of laughter and cheering and the Four Mile Circus ripped into high gear. The kitchens sizzled and smoked. There was a perpetuity of eating and drinking. The music never stopped. The vaudeville never ceased.

Inside his tent, Fourmyle changed his clothes, changed his mind, changed again, undressed again, kicked his valets and called for his tailor in a bastard tongue of French, Mayfair and affectation. Half-way into a new suit, he recollected he had neglected to bathe. He slapped his tailor, ordered ten gallons of scent to be decanted into the pool, and was stricken with poetic inspiration. He summoned his resident poet.

`Take this down,' Fourmyle commanded. 'Le roi eat mort, les - Wait. What rhymes to moon?'

` June,' his poet suggested. ` Croon, soon, dune, loon, noon, rune, tune, boon . . .'

`I forgot my experiment!' Fourmyle exclaimed. `Dr Bohun! Dr Bohun!'

Half-naked, he rushed pell-mell into the laboratory where he blew himself and Dr Bohun, his resident chemist, half-way across the tent. As the chemist attempted to raise himself from the floor he found himself seized in a most painful and embarrassing stranglehold.

`Noguchi!' Fourmyle shouted. `Hi! Noguchi! I just invented a new judo hold.'

Fourmyle stood up, lifted the suffocating chemist and jaunted to the judo mat where the little Japanese inspected the hold and shook his head.

`No, please.' He hissed politely. `Hfffff. Pressure on windpipe are not perpetually lethal. Here I show you, please.'

He seized the dazed chemist, whirled him and deposited him on the mat in a position of perpetual self-strangulation. `You observe, please, Fourmyle?'

But Fourmyle was in the library bludgeoning his librarian over the head with Bloch's Das Sexual Leben (eight pounds, nine ounces) because that unhappy man could produce no text on the manufacture of perpetual motion machines. He rushed to his physics laboratory where he destroyed an expensive chronometer to experiment with cog wheels, jaunted to the bandstand where he seized a baton and led the orchestra into confusion, put on skates and fell into the scented swimming pool, was hauled out, swearing fulminously at the lack of ice, and was heard to express a desire for solitude.

`I wish to commune with myself,' Fourmyle said, kicking his valets in all directions. He was snoring before the last of them limped to the door and closed it behind him.

The snoring stopped and Foyle arose. `That ought to hold them for today,' he muttered, and went into his dressing-room. He stood before a mirror, took a deep breath and held it, meanwhile watching his face. At the expiration of one minute it was still untainted. He continued to hold his breath, maintaining rigid control over pulse and muscle, mastering the strain with iron calm. At two minutes and twenty seconds the stigmata appeared, blood-red. Foyle let out his breath. The tiger mask faded.

`Better,' he murmured. `Much better. The old fakir was right, Yoga is the answer. Control. Pulse, breath, bowels, brains.'

He stripped and examined his body. He was in magnificent condition, but his skin still showed delicate silver seams in a network from neck to ankles. They looked as though someone had carved an outline of the nervous system into Foyle's flesh. They were the scars of an operation and they had not yet faded.

The operation had cost Foyle Cr 200,000 bribe to the chief surgeon of the Mars Commando Brigade and had transformed him into an extraordinary fighting machine. Every nerve plexus had been rewired, microscopic transistors and transformers had been buried in muscle and bone, a minute platinum outlet showed at the base of his spine. To this Foyle affixed a power-pack the size of a pea and switched it on. His body began an internal electronic vibration that was almost mechanical.

`More machine than man,' he thought. He dressed, rejected the extravagant apparel of Fourmyle of Ceres for the anonymous black coverall of action.

He jaunted to Robin Wednesbury's apartment in the lonely building amidst the Wisconsin pines. It was the real reason for the advent of the Four Mile Circus in Green Bay. He jaunted and arrived in darkness and empty space and immediately plummeted down.

`Christ!' he thought. `Mis-jaunted?'

The broken end of a rafter dealt him a bruising blow and he landed heavily on a shattered floor upon the putrefying remains of a corpse.

Foyle leaped up in calm revulsion. He pressed hard with his tongue against his right upper first molar. The operation that had transformed half his body into an electronic machine, had located the control switchboard in his teeth. Foyle pressed a tooth with his tongue and the peripheral cells of his retina were excited into emitting a soft light. He looked down two pale beams at the corpse of a man.

The corpse lay in the apartment below Robin Wednesbury's flat. It was gutted. Foyle looked up. Above him was a ten-foot hole where the floor of Robin's living-room had been. The entire building stank of fire, smoke and rot.

`Jacked,' Foyle said softly. `This place has been jacked. What happened?'

The jaunting age had crystallized the hoboes, tramps and vagabonds of the world into a new class. It followed the night from east to west, always in darkness, always in search of loot, the leavings of disaster, carrion. If earthquake shattered a warehouse, they were jacking it the following night. If fire opened a house or explosion split the defenses of a shop, they jaunted in and scavenged. They called themselves Jack-Jaunters. They were jackals.

Foyle climbed up through the wreckage to the corridor on the floor above. The Jack-Jaunters had a camp there. A whole calf roasted before a fire, which sparked up to the sky through a rent in the roof. There were a dozen men and three women around the fire, rough, dangerous, jabbering in the cockney rhyming slang of the jackals. They were dressed in mismatched clothes and drinking potato beer from champagne glasses.

An ominous growl of anger and terror met Foyle's appearance as the big man in black came up through the rubble, his intent eyes emitting pale beams of light. Calmly, he strode through the rising mob to the entrance of Robin Wednesbury's flat. The iron control that he was making a habit gave him an air of detachment.

`If she's dead,' he thought, `I'm finished. I've got to use her. But if she's dead . . .'

Robin's apartment was gutted like the rest of the building. The living-room was an oval of floor around the jagged hole in the centre. Foyle searched for a body. Two men and a woman were in the bed in the bedroom. The men cursed. The woman shrieked at the apparition. The men hurled themselves at Foyle. He backed a step and pressed his tongue against his upper incisors. Neural circuits buzzed and every sense and response in his body was accelerated by a factor of five.

The effect was an instantaneous reduction of the external world to extreme slow action. Sound became a deep garble, color shifted down the spectrum to the red. The two assailants seemed to float towards him with dream-like languor. To the rest of the world Foyle became a blur of action. He sidestepped the blow inching towards him, walked around the man, raised him and threw him towards the crater in the living-room. He threw the second man. To Foyle's accelerated senses their bodies seemed to drift slowly, still in mid-stride, fists inching forward, open mouths emitting heavy clotted sounds.

Foyle whipped to the women cowering in the bed.

`Wsthrabdy?' the blur asked.

The woman shrieked.

Foyle pressed his upper incisors again, cutting off the acceleration. The external world shook itself out of slow motion back to normal. Sound and color leaped up the spectrum and the two jackals disappeared through the crater and crashed into the apartment below.

`Was there a body?' Foyle repeated gently. `A Negro girl?'

The woman was unintelligible. He took, her by the hair and shook her, then hurled her through the crater in the living room floor.

His search for a clue to Robin's fate was interrupted by the mob from the hall. They carried torches and makeshift weapons. The Jack-Jaunters were not professional killers. They only worried defenseless prey to death. `Don't bother me,' Foyle warned quietly, ferreting intently through closets and under overturned furniture.

They edged closer, goaded by a ruffian in a mink suit and a tricorne hat, and inspired by the curses percolating up from the floor below. The man in the tricorne threw a torch at Foyle. It burned him. Foyle accelerated again and the Jack-Jaunters were transformed into living statues. Foyle picked up half a chair and calmly clubbed the slow-motion figures. They remained upright. He thrust the man in the tricorne down on the floor and knelt on him. Then he decelerated.

Again the external world came to life. The jackals dropped in their tracks, pole-axed. The man in the tricorne hat and mink suit roared.

`Was there a body here?' Foyle asked. `Negro girl. Very tall. Very beautiful.'

The man writhed and attempted to gouge Foyle's eyes.

`You keep track of bodies,' Foyle said gently. `Some of you Jacks like dead girls better than live ones. Did you find her body in here?'

Receiving no satisfactory answer, he picked up a torch and set fire to the mink suit. He followed the Jack-Jaunter into the living-room and watched him with detached interest. The man howled, toppled over the edge of the crater and flamed down into the darkness below.

`Was there a body?'

Foyle called down quietly. He shook his head at the answer. `Not very deft,' he murmured. `I've got to learn how to extract information. Dagenham could teach me a thing or two.'

He switched off his electronic system and jaunted.

He appeared in Green Bay, smelling so abominably of singed hair and scorched skin that he entered the local Presteign shop (jewels, perfumes, cosmetics, Tonics and surrogates) to buy a deodorant. But the local Mr. Presto had evidently witnessed the arrival of the Four-Mile Circus and recognized him. Foyle at once awoke from his detached intensity and became the outlandish Fourmyle of Ceres. He clowned and cavorted, bought a twelve-ounce flagon of Euge No. 5 at Cr 500 the ounce, dabbed himself delicately and tossed the bottle into the street to the edification and delight of Mr. Presto.

The Record Clerk at the County Record Office was unaware of Foyle's identity and obdurate and uncompromising.

`No, Sir. County Records Are Not Viewed Without Proper Court Order For Sufficient Cause. That Is My Final Word.'

Foyle examined him keenly and without rancor. `Asthenic type,' he decided. `Slender, long-boned, no strength. Epileptoid character. Self-centered, pedantic, single-minded, shallow. Not bribable; too repressed and straitlaced. But repression's the chink in his armor.'

An hour later six followers from the Four-Mile Circus waylaid the Record Clerk. They were of the female persuasion and richly endowed with vice. Two hours late, the Record Clerk, dazed by flesh and the devil, delivered up his information. The apartment building had been opened to Jack-jaunting by a gas explosion two weeks previous. All tenants had been forced to move. Robin Wednesbury was in protective confinement in Mercy Hospital near the Iron Mountain Proving Grounds.

`Protective confinement?'

Foyle wondered. `What for? What's she done?'

It took thirty minutes to organize a Christmas Party in the Four-Mile Circus. It was made up of musicians, singers, actors and rabble who knew the Iron Mountain co-ordinates. Led by their chief buffoon, they jaunted up with music, fireworks, firewater, and gifts. They paraded through the town spreading largesse and laughter. They blundered into the radar field of the Proving Ground protection system and were driven out with laughter. Fourmyle of Ceres, dressed as Santa Claus, scattering banknotes from a huge sack over his shoulder and leaping in agony as the induction field of the protection system burned his bottom, made an entrancing spectacle. They burst into Mercy Hospital, following Santa Claus who roared and cavorted with the detached calm of a solemn elephant. He kissed the nurses, made drunk the attendants, pestered the patients with gifts, littered the corridors with money, and abruptly disappeared when the happy rioting reached such heights that the police had to be called. Much later it was discovered that a patient had disappeared too, despite the fact that she had been under sedation and was incapable of jaunting. As a matter of fact she departed from the hospital inside Santa's sack.