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The Stars My Destination ( Tiger! Tiger! ) :: Bester Alfred
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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: Aldeberan 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 space-time with growing assurance.
NOW: Antares, an Mi red giant, paired like Aldeberan, 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 Joseph who had tattooed Foyle's tiger face and mated him to the girl, Moira.
He was back aboard «Nomad.»
Gully Foyle is my name
And TeTra is my nation.
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: Aldeberan 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 space-time with growing assurance.
NOW: Antares, an Mi red giant, paired like Aldeberan, 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 Joseph who had tattooed Foyle's tiger face and mated him to the girl, Moira.
He was back aboard «Nomad.»
Gully Foyle is my name
And TeTra is my nation.