"Bester, Alfred - Tiger! Tiger!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bester Alfred)

The limitations with which every man is born necessarily limited the ability to jaunte. Some could visualize magnificently and set the co-ordinates of their destination with precision, but lacked the power to get there. Others had the power but could not, so to speak, see where they were jaunting. And space set a final limitation, for no man had ever jaunted farther than a thousand miles. He could work his way in jaunting jumps over land and water from Nome to Mexico, but no jump could exceed a thousand miles.

By the 2420's this form of employment application blank had become a commonplace:

This space reserved for retina pattern identification

NAME (Capital Letters): .......................................(Last Middle First)

RESIDENCE (Legal): ..................................(Continent Country County)

JAUNTE CLASS (Official Rating: Check One Only):

M (1000) miles:
L (50 miles):
D (500 miles):
C (l00 miles):
X (10 miles):
V (5 miles):

The old Bureaux of Motor Vehicles took over the new job and regularly tested and classed jaunte applicants, and the old American Automobile Association changed its initials to A.J.A.

Despite all efforts, no man had ever jaunted across the voids of space although many experts and fools had tried. Helmut Grant, for one, who spent a month memorizing the co-ordinates of a jaunte stage on the moon and visualized every mile of the two hundred-and-forty-thousand-mile trajectory from Times Square to Kepler City. Grant jaunted and disappeared. They never found him. They never found Enzio Dandridge, a Los Angeles revivalist looking for Heaven; Jacob Maria Freundlich, a paraphysicist who should have known better than to jaunte into a deep space searching for meta-dimensions; Shipwreck Cogan, a professional seeker after notoriety; and hundreds of others, lunatic fringers, neurotics, escapists and suicides. Space was closed to teleportation. Jaunting was restricted to the planets of the solar system.

But within three generations the entire solar system was on the jaunte. The transition was more spectacular than the change-over from horse and buggy to gasoline age four centuries before. On three planets and eight satellites, social, legal and economic structures crashed while the new customs and laws demanded by universal jaunting mushroomed in their place.

There were land riots as the jaunting poor deserted slums to squat in plains and forests, raiding the livestock and wildlife. There was a revolution in home and office building, labyrinths and masking devices had to be introduced to prevent unlawful entry by jaunting. There were crashes and panics and strikes and famines as pre-jaunte industries failed.

Plagues and pandemics raged as jaunting vagrants carried disease and vermin into defenseless countries. Malaria, elephantiasis and the break-bone fever came north to Greenland; rabies returned to England after an absence of three hundred years. The Japanese beetle, the citrons scale, the chestnut blight and the elm borer spread to every corner in the world, and from one forgotten pest-hole in Borneo, leprosy, long imagined extinct, reappeared.

Crime waves swept the planets and satellites as the underworlds took to jaunting with the night around the clock, and there were brutalities as the police fought them without quarter. There came a hideous return to the worst prudery of Victorianism as society fought the sexual and moral dangers of jaunting with protocol and taboo. A cruel and vicious war broke out between the Inner Planets, Venus, Terra and Mars, and the Outer Satellites . . . a war brought on by the economic and political pressures of teleportation.

Until the Jaunte Age dawned, the three inner planets (and the Moon) had lived in delicate economic balance with the seven inhabited outer satellites; Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto of Jupiter; Rhea and Titan of Saturn; and Lassell of Neptune. The United Outer Satellites supplied raw materials for the Inner Planets manufactories, and a market for their finished goods. Within a decade this balance was destroyed by jaunting.

The Outer Satellites, raw young worlds in the making, had bought seventy per cent of the L.P. transportation production. Jaunting ended that. They had bought ninety per cent of the LP. communications production. Jaunting ended that too. In consequence L.P. purchase of O.S. raw materials fell off. With trade exchange destroyed it was inevitable that the economic war would degenerate into a shooting war. Inner Planets cartels refused to ship manufacturing equipment to the Outer Satellites, attempting to protect themselves against competition. The O.S. confiscated the planets already in operation on their worlds, broke patent agreements, ignored royalty obligations . . . and the war was on.

It was an age of freaks, monsters and grotesques. All the world was misshapen in marvelous and malevolent ways. The Classicists and Romantics who hated it were unaware of the potential greatness of the twenty-fourth century. They were blind to a cold fact of evolution . . . that progress stems from clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. Classicists and Romantics alike were unaware that the solar system was trembling on the verge of a human explosion that would transform man and make him the master of the universe.

It is against this seething background of the twenty-fourth century that the vengeful history of Gully Foyle begins.

Part One

I

He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. He fought for survival with the passion of a beast in a trap. He was delirious and rotting, but occasionally his primitive mind emerged from the burning nightmare of survival into something resembling sanity. Then he lifted his mute face to Eternity and muttered: `What's a matter, me? Help, you Heels. Help, is all.'

Blasphemy came easily to him; it was half his speech, all his life. He had been raised in the gutter school of the twenty-fourth century and spoke nothing but the gutter tongue. Of all brutes in the world he was least valuable alive and most likely to live. So he struggled to survive and prayed in blasphemy; but occasionally his raveling mind leaped backward thirty years to his childhood and remembered a nursery jingle:

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.