Tiger! Tiger! (9 page)

`Darling, darling, darling,' she whispered. `You aren't going to start all that again, are you? The doctor swore you were over it.'

`Start what again?' `All that Gulliver Foyle nonsense about your being a common sailor and -'

`I am Gully Foyle. That's my name, Gully Foyle.'

`Sweetheart, you're not. That's just a delusion you've had for weeks. You've been overworking and drinking too much.'

`Been Gully Foyle all my life, me.' `Yes, I know, darling. That's the way it's seemed to you. But you're not. You're Geoffrey Fourmyle. The Geoffrey Fourmyle. You're - Oh, what's the sense telling you? Get dressed, my love. You've got to come downstairs. Your office has been frantic.' Foyle permitted the valet to dress him and went downstairs in a daze. The lovely girl, who evidently adored him, conducted him through a giant studio littered with drawing-tables, easels, and half-finished canvases. She took him into a vast hall filled with desks, file cabinets, stock tickers, clerks, secretaries, office personnel. They entered a lofty laboratory cluttered with glass and chrome. Burners flickered and hissed; bright colored liquids bubbled and churned; there was a pleasant odor of interesting chemicals and odd experiments.

`What's all this?' Foyle asked.

The girl seated Foyle in a plush armchair alongside a giant desk littered with interesting papers scribbled with fascinating symbols. On some Foyle saw the name: Geoffrey Fourmyle, scrawled in an imposing authoritative signature.

`There's some crazy kind of mistake, is all,' Foyle began.

The girl silenced him. `Here's Dr Regan. He'll explain.' An impressive gentleman with a crisp, comforting manner, came to Foyle, touched his pulse, inspected his eyes, and nodded in satisfaction.

`Good,' he said `Excellent. You are close to complete recovery, Mr. Fourmyle. Now you will listen to me for a moment, eh?' Foyle nodded.

`You remember nothing of the past. You have only a false memory. You were overworked. You are an important man and there were too many demands on you. You started to drink heavily a month ago - No, no, denial is useless. You drank. You lost yourself.'

`I -'

'You became convinced you were not the famous Jeff Fourmyle. An infantile attempt to escape responsibility. You imagined you were a common spaceman named Foyle. Gulliver Foyle, yes? With an odd number. .

`Gully Foyle. AS: I27/I27: 006. But that's me. That's -'

`It is not you. This is you.' Dr Regan waved at the interesting offices they could see through the transparent glass wall.

`You can only recapture the true memory if you discharge the old. All this glorious reality is yours, if we can help you discard the dream of the spaceman.' Dr Regan leaned forward, his polished spectacles glittering hypnotically. `Reconstruct this false memory of yours in detail, and I will tear it down. Where do you imagine you left the spaceship Nomad? How did you escape? Where do you imagine the Nomad is now?' Foyle wavered before the romantic glamour of the scene, which seemed to be just within his grasp.

`It seems to me I left Nomad out in -' He stopped short.

A devil-face peered at him from the highlights reflected in Dr Regan's spectacles . . . a hideous tiger mask with Nomad blazoned across the distorted brow. Foyle stood up.

`Liars!' he growled. `It's real, me. This here is phony. What happened to me is real. I'm real, me.'

Saul Dagenham walked into the laboratory. `All right,' he called. ` Strike. It's a wash-out.' The bustling scene in laboratory, office and studio ended. The actors quietly disappeared without another glance at Foyle.

Dagenham gave Foyle his deadly smile. `Tough, aren't you? You're really unique. My name is Saul Dagenham. We've got five minutes for a talk. Come into the garden.' The Sedative Garden atop the Therapy Building was a triumph of therapeutic planning. Every perspective, every color, every contour had been designed to placate hostility, soothe resistance, melt anger, evaporate hysteria, shore up melancholia and depression.

`Sit down,' Dagenham said, pointing to a bench alongside a pool in which crystal water tinkled. `I'll have to walk around a bit. Can't come too close to you. I'm "hot". D'you know what that means?'

Foyle shook his head sullenly.

Dagenham cupped both hands around the flaming blossom of an orchid and held them there for a moment. `Watch that flower,' he said. `You'll see.' He paced up a path and turned suddenly. `You're right, of course. Everything that happened to you is real . . . Only what did happen?'

`Go to hell,' Foyle growled.

`You know, Foyle, I admire you.'

`Go to hell.'

`In your own primitive way you've got ingenuity and guts. You're Cro-Magnon, Foyle. I've been checking on you. That bomb you threw in the Presteign shipyards was lovely, and you nearly wrecked General Hospital getting the money and material together.' Dagenham counted fingers. `You looted lockers, stole from the blind ward, stole drugs from the pharmacy, stole apparatus from the lab stockrooms.'

`Go to hell, you.'

`But what have you against Presteign? Why'd you try to blow up his shipyard? They tell me you broke in and went tearing through the pits like a Comanche Indian. What were you trying to do, Foyle?'

`Go to hell.'

Dagenham smiled. `If we're going to chat,' he said, `you'll have to hold up your end. Your conversation's getting monotonous. What happened to Nomad?'

`I don't know about Nomad, nothing.'

`The ship was last reported over seven months ago. Then . . . spurlos versenkt. Are you the sole survivor? And what have you been doing all this time? Having your face decorated?'

`I don't know about Nomad, nothing.'

`No, no, Foyle, that won't do. You show up with Nomad tattooed across your face. Fresh tattooed. Intelligence checks and finds you were aboard Nomad when she sailed. Foyle, Gulliver: AS: 128/127:006, Mechanic's Mate, 3rd Class. As if all this isn't enough to throw intelligence into a tizzy, you come back in a private launch that's been missing fifty years. Man, you're cooking in the reactor. Intelligence wants the answer to all these questions. And you ought to know how Central Intelligence butchers its answers out of people.'

Foyle started. Dagenham nodded as he saw his point sink home. `Which is why I think you'll listen to reason. We want information, Foyle. I tried to trick it out of you; admitted. I failed because you're too tough; admitted. Now I'm offering an honest deal. We'll protect you if you'll co-operate. If you don't, you'll spend five years in an Intelligence lab having information chopped out of you.' It was not the prospect of the butchery that frightened Foyle, but the thought of the loss of freedom. A man had to be free to raise money and find Vorga again; to rip and tear and gut Vorga.

`What kind of deal?' he asked.

`Tell us what happened to Nomad and where you left her.'

`Why, man?' `Why? Because of the salvage, man.'

`There ain't nothing to salvage. She's a wreck, is all.'

`Even a wreck's salvageable.'

`You mean you'd jet out a million miles to pick up pieces? Don't jokes me, man.'

`All right,' Dagenham said in exasperation. `There's the cargo.'

'She was split wide open. No cargo left.'

`It was a cargo you don't know about,' Dagenham said confidentially. `Nomad was transporting platinum bullion to Mars Bank. Every so often, banks have to adjust accounts. Normally, enough trade goes on between planets so that accounts can be balanced on paper. The war's disrupted normal trade, and Mars Bank found that Presteign owed them twenty odd million credits without any way of getting the money short of actual delivery. Presteign was delivering the money in bar platinum aboard the Nomad. It was locked in the purser's safe.'

`Twenty million,' Foyle whispered.

`Give or take a few thousand. The ship was insured, but that just means that the underwriters, Bo'ness and Uig, get the salvage rights and they're even tougher than Presteign. However, there'll be a reward for you. Say . . . twenty thousand credits.'

`Twenty million,' Foyle whispered again.

`We're assuming that an O.S. raider caught up with Nomad somewhere on course and let her have it. They couldn't have boarded and looted or you wouldn't have been left alive. This means that the purser's safe is still - Are you listening, Foyle?'

But Foyle was not listening. He was seeing twenty millions ... not twenty thousand ... twenty millions in platinum bullion as a broad highway to Vorga. No more petty thefts from lockers and labs; twenty millions for the taking and the razing of Vorga.

`Foyle!'

Foyle awoke. He looked at Dagenham. `I don't know about Nomad, nothing,' he said.

`What the hell's got into you now? Why're you dummying up again?'

'I don't know about Nomad, nothing.'

`I'm offering a fair reward. A spaceman can go on a hell of a tear with twenty thousand credits . . . a one-year tear. What more do you want?'

`I don't know about Nomad, nothing.'

'It's us or Intelligence, Foyle.'

'You ain't so anxious for them to get me, or you wouldn't be flipping through all this. But it ain't no use, anyway. I don't know about Nomad, nothing.'

'You son of a -' Dagenham tried to repress his anger. He had revealed just a little too much to this cunning primitive creature. `You're right,' he said. `We're not anxious for Intelligence to get you. But we've made our own preparations.' His voice hardened. `You think you can dummy up and stand us off. You think you can leave us to whistle for Nomad. You've even got an idea that you can beat us to the salvage.'

`No,' Foyle said.

`Now listen to this. We've got a lawyer waiting in New York. He's got criminal prosecution for piracy pending against you; piracy in space, murder and looting. We're going to throw the book at you. Presteign will get a conviction in twenty-four hours. If you've got a criminal record of any kind, that means a lobotomy. They'll open up the top of your skull and burn out half your brain to stop you from ever jaunting again.' Dagenham stopped and looked hard at Foyle. When Foyle shook his head Dagenham continued. - `If you haven't got a record, they'll hand you ten years of what is laughingly known as medical treatment. We don't punish criminals in our enlightened age, we cure 'em; and the cure is worse than punishment. They'll stash you in a black hole in one of the cave hospitals. You'll be kept in permanent darkness and solitary confinement so you can't jaunte out. They'll go through the motions of giving you shots and therapy, but you'll be rotting in the dark. You'll stay there and rot until you decide to talk. We'll keep you there for ever. So make up your mind.'

'Vorga, I kill you deadly.'

`I don't know nothing about Nomad. Nothing!' Foyle said.

`All right,' Dagenham spat. Suddenly he pointed to the orchid blossom he had enclosed with his hands. It was blighted and rotting. `That's what's going to happen to you.'

5

South of Saint-Girons near the Spanish-French border is the deepest abyss in France, the Gouffre Martel. Its caverns twist for miles under the Pyrenees. It is the most formidable cavern hospital on Terra. No patient has ever jaunted out of its pitch darkness. No patient has ever succeeded in getting his bearings and learning the jaunte co-ordinates of the black hospital depths.

Short of prefrontal lobotomy, there are only three ways to stop a man from jaunting: a blow on the head producing concussion, sedation which prevents concentration, and concealment of jaunte co-ordinates. Of the three, the jaunting age considered concealment the most practical.

The cells that line the winding passages of Gouffre Martel are cut out of living rock. They are never illuminated. The passages are never illuminated. Infra red lamps flood the darkness. It is black light visible only to guards and attendants wearing snooper goggles with specially treated lenses. For the patients there is only the black silence of Gouffre Martel broken by the distant rush of underground waters.