Tiger! Tiger!

By Alfred Bester

" Dearly beloved we are gathered here today as mark of respect at the time of the passing on of our dear friend. This was a paperback book which came into being over 20 years ago, full of hope and promise. Now that life has ended. Advancing years combined with a certain stiffness of the spine (old glue!) and a tendency to curl at the edges, mean that all that remains after the rigours of its final scanning is a tattered pile which we will now commit respectfully to the bin (I also loathed the cover!). Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain knowledge of the resurrection to eternal life....as an e-book. You could say that this book died for your sins, so that you may have the pleasure of its presence on your hard drive forever more. Here Endeth the lesson. ....Amen. "

So William Gibson invented Cyberpunk? Maybe it was Bruce Bethke? Read this, published in the early 1950's, and then think back. You can see Bester's influence on a whole range of writers since then, from Heinlein to most of the 'New Wave' and their ilk.

Unfortunately as a writer Bester's range was a little limited, and he tended to revisit the same material again and again. The similarities between this and his other great book 'The Demolished Man' are such that after I haven't read them for a while they seem to merge into one. Demolished is in many ways more ambitious, but this is my favourite because of Gully. He's a great character. On the other hand 50 years later, I don't think either writers or readers would let him get away with what he does to Robin Wednesbury! ...Enjoy...AFB

P.S. See notes at end re new posting strategy

'This was a golden age, a tune of high adventure, rich living and hard dying. .
 
but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes; a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it'.

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

Gully Foyle - liar, lecher, ghoul, walking cancer. Obsessed by vengeance, he's also the twenty-fourth century's most valuable commodity - but he doesn't know it.

His story is one of the great classics of science fiction.

'A definitive statement in Wide Screen Baroque, a kind of free-wheeling interplanetary adventure, full of brilliant scenery, dramatic sciences, and a joyous 1 taking for granted of the unlikely' Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree Penguin Science Fiction

Tiger! Tiger!

Alfred Bester was born in 1913 and was educated at Pennsylvania University, where he studied science and the fine arts. He became a professional author after winning a writing competition in 1939. His novel The Demolished Man was voted the outstanding book of the year by the eleventh World Science Fiction Congress, and is also published in Penguins. His most recent books are Extro (1975) and The Light Fantastic (1971: a collection of short stories).

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth. Middlesex, England Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R IB4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, x82-x9o Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published is the U.S.A. 1955 Published in Great Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson 1956 Published in Penguin Books x967 Reprinted 1974, 1979 Copyright p Alfred Best-, 1955 AD rights reserved Made and printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, London, Reading and Fakenham Set in Monotype Plantin Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that is which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Prologue

This was a golden age, a time of high adventure, rich living and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice. . , but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it.

All the habitable worlds of the solar system were occupied. Three planets and eight satellites and eleven million millions of people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds still yearned for other times, as always, as ever. The solar system seethed with activity . . . fighting, feeding, and breeding, learning the new technologies that spewed forth almost before the old had been mastered, girding itself for the first exploration of the stars in deep space; but `Where are the new frontiers?' the Romantics cried while the frontier of the mind opened in a dramatic incident that took place in a laboratory on Callisto at the turn of the twenty-fourth century.

A researcher named Jaunte set fire to his bench and himself (accidentally) and let out a yell for help with particular reference to a fire extinguisher. Who so surprised as Jaunte and his colleagues when he found himself standing alongside said extinguisher which was seventy feet removed from his lab bench.

They put Jaunte out and went into the whys and wherefores of his seventy-foot journey. Teleportation . . . the transportation of oneself through space by an effort of the mind alone . . . had long been a theoretic concept, and there were a few hundred badly documented proofs that it had happened is the past. This was the first time that it had ever taken place before professional observers.

They investigated the Jaunte Effect savagely. This was something too earth-shaking to handle with kid gloves, and anyway Jaunte was anxious to make his name immortal. He made his will and said farewell to his friends. Jaunte knew he was going to die because his fellow researchers were determined to kill him. There was no doubt about that.

Twelve psychologists, Para-psychologists and neurometrists of varying specialization were carried in as observers. The experimenters sealed Jaunte into an unbreakable crystal tank. They opened a water valve, feeding water into the tank, and let Jaunte watch them smash the valve handle. It was impossible to open the tank; it was impossible to stop the flow of water.

The theory was that if it had required the threat of death to goad Jaunte into teleporting himself in the first place, they'd damned well threaten him with death again. The tank filled quickly. The observers collected data with the tense precision of an eclipse camera crew. Jaunte began to drown. Then he was outside the tank, dripping and coughing explosively. He'd teleported again.

The experts examined and questioned him. They studied graphs and X-rays, neural patterns and body chemistry. They began to get an inkling of how Jaunte had teleported. On the technical grapevine (this had to be kept secret) they sent out a call for suicide volunteers. They were still in the primitive stage of teleportation; death was the only spur they knew.

They briefed the volunteers thoroughly. Jaunte lectured on what he had done and how he thought he had done it. Then they proceeded to murder the volunteers. They drowned them, hung them, burned them; they invented new forms of slow and controlled death. There was never any doubt in any of the subjects that death was the object.

Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, and the agonies and remorse of their murderers would make a fascinating and horrible study, but that has no place in this history except in highlight the monstrosity of the times. Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, but twenty per cent jaunted. (The name became a word almost immediately.) `Bring back the romantic age,' the Romantics pleaded, `when men can risk their lives in high adventure.' The body of knowledge grew rapidly. By the first decade of the twenty-fourth century the principles of jaunting were established and the first school was opened by Charles Fort Jaunte himself, then fifty-seven, immortalized, and ashamed to admit that he had never dared jaunte again. But the primitive days were past; it was no longer necessary to threaten a man with death to make him teleport. They had learned how to teach man to recognize, discipline and exploit yet another resource of his limitless mind.

How, exactly, did man teleport? One of the most unsatisfactory explanations was provided by Spencer Thompson, publicity representative of the Jaunte Schools, in a press interview.

THOMPSON: Jaunting is like seeing; it is a natural aptitude of almost every human organism, but it can only be developed by training and experience.

REPORTER: You mean we couldn't see without practice?

THOMPSON: Obviously you're either unmarried or have no children . . . preferably both.

(Laughter.)

REPORTER: I don't understand.

THOMPSON: Anyone who'd observed an infant learning to use its eyes, would.

REPORTER: But what is teleportation?

THOMPSON: The transportation of oneself from one locality to another by an effort of the mind alone.

REPORTER: You mean we can think ourselves from ... Say . . . New York to Chicago?

THOMPSON: Precisely.

REPORTER: Would we arrive naked?

THOMPSON: If you started naked.

(Laughter.)

REPORTER: I mean, would our clothes teleport with us?

THOMPSON: When people teleport, they also teleport the clothes they wear and whatever they are strong enough to carry. I hate to disappoint you, but even ladies' clothes would arrive with them.

(Laughter.)

REPORTER: But how do we do it?

THOMPSON: How do we think?

REPORTER: With our minds.

THOMPSON: And how does the mind think? What is the thinking process? Exactly how do we remember, imagine, deduce, create? Exactly how do the brain cells operate?

REPORTER: I don't know. Nobody knows.

THOMPSON: And nobody knows exactly how we teleport either, but we know we can do it - just as we know that we can think. Have you ever heard of Descartes? He said: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. We say: Cogito ergo jaunte. I think, therefore I jaunte.

If it is thought that Thompson's explanation is exasperating, inspect this report of Sir John Kelvin to the Royal Society on the mechanism of jaunting: `We have established that the teleportative ability is associated with the Nissl bodies, or Tigroid Substance in nerve cells. The Tigroid Substance is easiest demonstrated by Nissls' method using 3.75 g. of methylene blue and 1.75 g. of Venetian soap dissolved in 1,000 cc. of water.