Tiger! Tiger! (29 page)

`I'm your friend. Look, I know all about those big hairy men who pretend to be you, but I won't tell. Read me and see.'

`You're going to hurt him and y'you want me to tell ham.'

`Who?) 'The captain-man. The Skl- Skot-' The child fumbled with the word, wailing louder. `Go away. You're bad. Badness in your head and burning mens and -'

`Come here, Sigurd.'

`No. NANNIE! NAN-N-I-E!'

'Shut up you little bastard!'

Foyle grabbed the seventy-year-old child and shook it. `This is going to be a brand-new experience for you, Sigurd. The first time you've ever been walloped into anything. Understand?'

The ancient child read him and howled.

`Shut up! We're going on a trip to the Sklotsky Colony. If you behave yourself and do what you're told, I'll bring you back safe and give you a lolly or whatever the hell they bribe you with. If you don't behave, I'll beat the living daylights out of you.'

`No, you won't . . . You won't. I'm Sigurd Magsman. I'm Sigurd the telepath. You wouldn't dare.'

`Sonny, I'm Gully Foyle, Solar Enemy Number One. I'm just a step away from the finish of a year-long hunt . . . I'm risking my neck because I need you to settle accounts with a son of a bitch who - Sonny, I'm Gully Foyle. There isn't anything I wouldn't dare.'

The telepath began broadcasting terror with such an uproar that alarms sounded all over Mars St Michele. Foyle took a firm grip on the ancient child, accelerated, and carried him out of the fortress. Then he jaunted.

URGENT. MOST SECRET. SIGURD MAGSMAN KIDNAPPED BY MAN TENTATIVELY IDENTIFIED AS GULLIVER FOYLE, ALIAS FOURMYLE OF CERES, SOLAR ENEMY NUMBER ONE. DESTINATION TENTATIVELY FIXED. ALERT COMMANDO BRIGADE. INFORM CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE. URGENT! URGENT! URGENT!

The ancient Sklotsky sect of White Russia, believing that sex was the root of all evil, practiced an atrocious self-castration to extirpate the root. The modern Sklotskys, believing that sensation was the root of all evil, practiced an even more barbaric custom. Having entered the Sklotsky Colony and paid a fortune for the privilege, the initiates submitted joyously to an operation that severed the sensory nervous system, and lived out their days without sight, sound, speech, smell, taste or touch.

When they first entered the monastery, the initiates were shown elegant ivory cells in which it was intimated they would spend the remainder of their lives in rapt contemplation, lovingly tended. In actuality, the senseless creatures were packed is catacombs where they sat on rough stone slabs and were fed and exercised once a day. For twenty-three out of twenty-four hours they sat alone in the dark, untended, unguarded, unloved.

`The living dead,' Foyle muttered. He decelerated, put Sigurd Magsman down, and switched on the retinal light in his eyes, trying to pierce the womb-gloom. It was midnight above ground. It was permanent midnight down in these catacombs. Sigurd Magsman was broadcasting terror and anguish with such a telepathic bray that Foyle was forced to shake the child again.

`Shut up!' he whispered. `You can't wake these dead. Now find me Lindsey Joyce.'

`They're sick . . . all sick.. . like worm in their heads . . . worm and sickness and -'

`Christ, don't I know it. Come on, let's get it over with. There's worse to come.'

They went down the twisting labyrinth of the catacombs. The stone slabs shelved the walls from floor to ceiling. The Sklotskys, white as slugs, mute as corpses, motionless as Buddhas, filled the caverns with the odor of living death. The telepathic child wept and shrieked. Foyle never relaxed his relentless grip on him; he never relaxed the hunt.

`Johnson, Wright, Keely, Graff, Nastro, Underwood . . . God, there's thousands here.'

Foyle read off the bronze identification plates attached to the slabs. `Reach out, Sigurd. Find Lindsey Joyce for me. We can't go over them name by name. Regal, Cone, Brady, Vincent - What in the?'

Foyle started back. One of the bone-white figures had cuffed his brow. It was swaying and writhing, its face twitching. All the white slugs on their shelves were squirming and writhing. Sigurd Magsman's constant telepathic broadcast of anguish and terror was reaching them and torturing them.

`Shut up!' Foyle snapped. `Stop it. Find Lindsey Joyce and we'll get out of here. Reach out and find him.'

`Down there.' Sigurd wept. `Straight down there. Seven, eight, nine shelves down. I want to go home. I'm sick. I -'

Foyle went pell-mell down the catacombs with Sigurd, reading off identification plates until at last he came to `LINDSEY JOYCE. BOUGAINVILLE, VENUS.'

This was his enemy, the instigator of his death and the deaths of the six hundred from Callisto. This was the enemy whom he had planned and hunted for months. This was enemy for whom he had prepared the agony of the port stateroom aboard his yawl. This was Vorga. It was a woman.

'Foyle was thunderstruck. In these days of the double standard, with women kept in purdah, there were many reported cases of women masquerading as men to enter the worlds to them, but he had never yet heard of a woman in the merchant marine . . . masquerading her way on top officer rank.'

'This?' he exclaimed furiously. `This is Lindsey Joyce? Lindsey Joyce off the Vorga? Ask her.'

`I don't know what Vorga is.'

"Ask her!'

`But I don't - She was. . . She like gave orders.'

`Captain?'

'I don't like what's inside her. It's all sick and dark. It hurts. I want to go home.'

`Ask her. Was she captain of the Vorga?'

` Yes. Please, please, please don't make me go inside her any more. It's twisty and hurts. I don't like her.'

`Tell her I'm the man she wouldn't pick up on September 16th, 2336. Tell her it's taken a long time but I've finally come to settle the account. Tell her I'm going to pay her back.'

`I d-don't understand. Don't understand.'

`Tell her I'm going to kill her, slow and hard. Tell her I've got a stateroom aboard my yawl, fitted up just like my locker Plyboard Nomad where I rotted for six months . . . where she ordered Vorga to leave me to die. Tell her she's going to rot `die just like me. Tell her!'

Foyle shook the wizened child furiously `Make her feel it. Don't let her get away by turning Jerky. Tell her I kill her deadly. Read me and tell her!'

'She . . . Sh-She didn't give that order.'

'What!'

'I can't understand her.'

'She didn't give the order to scuttle me?'

Then he realized that the cloister was brilliantly lit with artificial light. There was the tramp of shod feet and the low growl of commands. Half way up the steps, Foyle stopped and mustered himself.

`Sigurd,' he whispered. `Who's above us? Find out' ` Sogers,' the child answered.

`Soldiers? What soldiers?'

`Commando sogers.' Sigurd's crumpled face brightened. They come for me. To take me home to Nannie. HERE I AM! HERE I AM'

The telepathic clamor brought a shout from overhead. Foyle accelerated and blurred up the rest of the steps to the cloister. It was a square of Romanesque arches surrounding a green lawn. In the centre of the lawn was a giant Cedar of Lebanon. The flagged walks swarmed with Commando search parties and Foyle came face to face with his match; for an instant after they saw his blur whip up from the catacombs they accelerated too, and all were on even terms.

But Foyle had the boy. Shooting was impossible. Cradling Sigurd in his arms, he wove through the cloister like a broken-field runner hurtling towards a goal. No one dared block him, for at plus-five acceleration a head-on collision between two bodies would be instantly fatal to both. Objectively, this break-neck skirmish looked like a five-second zigzag of lightning.

Foyle broke out of the cloister, went through the main hall of the monastery, passed through the labyrinth, and reached the public jaunte stage outside the main gate. There he stopped, decelerated and jaunted to the monastery airfield, half a mile distant. The field, too, was ablaze with lights and swarming with Commandos. Every anti-grav pit was occupied by a Brigade ship. His own yawl was under guard.

A fifth of a second after Foyle arrived at the field, the pursuers from the monastery jaunted in. He looked around desperately. He was surrounded by half a regiment of Commandos, all under acceleration, all geared for lethal-action, all his equal or better. The odds were impossible.

And then the Outer Satellites altered the odds. Exactly one week after the saturation raid on Terra, they struck at Mars.

Again the missiles came down on the midnight to dawn quadrant. Again the heavens twinkled with interceptions and detonations, and the horizon exploded great puffs of light while the ground shook. But this time there was a ghastly variation, for a brilliant nova burst overhead, flooding the nightside of the planet with garish light. A swarm of fissionheads had struck Mars' tiny satellite, Phobas, instantly vaporizing it into a sunlet.

The Recognition-Lag of the Commandos to this appalling attack gave Foyle his opportunity. He accelerated again and burst through them to his yawl. He stopped before the main hatch and saw the stunned guard-party hesitate between a continuance of the old action and a response to the new. Foyle hurled the frozen body of Sigurd Magsman up into the air like a Scotsman tossing the caber. As the guard party rushed to catch the boy, Foyle dived through them into his yawl, slammed the hatch and dogged it.

'Still under acceleration, never pausing to see if anyone was inside the yawl, he shot forward to controls, tripped the release lever, and as the yawl started to float up the anti-gray beam threw on full 10 G propulsion. He was not strapped into the pilot chair. The effect of the 10 G drive on his accelerated and unprotected body was monstrous.

A creeping force took hold of him and spilled him out of the chair. He inched back towards the rear wall of the control chamber like a sleep-walker. The wall appeared, to his accelerated senses, to approach him. He thrust out both arms, palms flat against the wall to brace himself. The sluggish power thrusting him back split his arms apart and forced him against the wall, gently at first, then harder and harder until face, jaw, chest and body were crushed against the metal.

The mounting pressure became agonizing. He tried to trip the switchboard in his mouth with his tongue, but the propulsion crushing him against the wall made it impossible for him to move his distorted mouth. A burst of explosions, so far down the sound spectrum that they sounded like sodden rockslides, told him that the Commando Brigade was bombarding hum with shots from below. As the yawl tore up into the blueblack of outer space, he began to scream in a bat-screech before he mercifully lost consciousness.

14

Foyle awoke in darkness. He was decelerated, but the exhaustion of his body told him he had been under acceleration while he was unconscious. Either his power pack had run out or . . . He inched a hand to the small of his back. The pack was gone. It had been removed.

He explored with trembling fingers. He was in bed. He listened to the murmur of ventilators and refrigerants and the click and buzz of servo-mechanisms. He was aboard a ship. He was strapped to the bed. The ship was in free fall.

Foyle unfastened himself, pressed his elbows against the mattress and floated up. He drifted through the darkness searching for a light switch or a call button. His hands brushed against a water carafe with raised letters on the glass. He read them with his fingertips. S.S. he felt. V, o, r, g, a. Vorga. He cried out.

The door of the stateroom opened. A figure drifted m through the door, silhouetted against the light of a luxurious private lounge behind it.

`This time we picked you up,' Olivia Presteign said.

`Olivia? 'Yes.'

`Then it's true?'