"The Stars My Destination"

[fiefoe]

Alfred Bester's master class in why interiority would just get in the way of a rollicking story -- itself a rewrite of an earlier rollicking story.

• 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 to highlight the monstrosity of the times. Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, but 20 per cent jaunted.
• Any man was capable of jaunting provided he developed two faculties, visualization and concentration. He had to visualize, completely and precisely, the spot to which he desired to teleport himself; and he had to concentrate the latent energy of his mind into a single thrust to get him there. Above all, he had to have faith
• The old Bureau 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 AJA.
• * 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... from one forgotten pesthole in Borneo, leprosy, long imagined extinct, reappeared.
• Until the Jaunte Age dawned, the three Inner Planets (and the Moon) had lived in delicate economic balance with the seven inhabited Outer Satellites:.. The Outer Satellites, raw young worlds in the making, had bought 70 per cent of the I.P. transportation production. Jaunting ended that.
• * Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love. The lethargic outlines of his character
• The ship was alongside him in a moment, passing him in a second, disappearing in a third.
  The sister had spurned him; the angel had abandoned him.
  Foyle stopped dancing and crooning. He stared in dismay. He leaped to the flare panel and slapped buttons. Distress signals, landing, take-off, and quarantine flares burst from the hull of the 'Nomad' in a madness of white, red and green light, pulsing, pleading… and 'Vorga-T: 1339' passed silently and implacably, stern jets flaring again as it accelerated on a sunward course.
  So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived, and he died...
  The acid of fury ran through him, eating away the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of Gully Foyle. He was dedicated.
• If he could put the 'Nomad' into a spin, centrifugal force would impart enough gravitation to the ship to draw fuel down into the combustion chamber of the jet. If he could fire the combustion chamber, the unequal thrust of the one jet would impart a spin to the 'Nomad.'
• But he couldn't fire the jet without first having the spin; and he couldn't get the spin without first firing the jet.
  He thought his way out of the deadlock; he was inspired by 'Vorga.' Foyle opened the drainage petcock in the combustion chamber of the jet and tortuously filled the chamber with fuel by hand. He had primed the pump. Now, if he ignited the fuel, it would fire long enough to impart the spin and start gravity...
  From the chemical stores Foyle brought a silvery bit of wire, pure sodium metal. He poked the wire through the open petcock. The sodium ignited when it touched the water and flared with high heat. The heat touched off the Hi-Thrust which burst in a needle flame from the petcock.
• * 'Choose.' Joseph said. 'The Scientific People practice Natural Selection. Be scientific in your choice. Be genetic.' ... A ten foot figure loomed up to the table. It was Joseph on stilts. He wore a surgical cap, a surgical mask, and a surgeon's gown that hung from his shoulders to the floor. The gown was heavily embroidered with red and black thread illustrating anatomical sections of the body. Joseph was a lurid tapestry out of a surgical text. 'I pronounce you Nomad!' Joseph intoned.
• * 'It does seem unfair. One-way telepathy is a nuisance. I do apologize for shrapneling you with my thoughts.' <> 'We like it, m'am. You think pretty.'
• for one thing was certain: you had to actually see a place to memorize it, which meant you first had to pay for the transportation to get you there. Even 3-D photographs would not do the trick. The Grand Tour had taken on a new significance for the rich.
• 'Don't hesitate before jaunting, Chief Harris. That starts doubting, and doubting ends jaunting. Just step up and bang off.'
• * Devoted to the principle of conspicuous waste, on which all society is based, Presteign of Presteign had fitted his Victorian mansion in Central Park with elevators, house phones, dumb-waiters and all the other laborsaving devices which jaunting had made obsolete.
• He was a senior specialist in chicanery and cajolery, trained to the incisive efficiency and boldness that characterized Dagenham Couriers and reflected the ruthlessness of its founder.
• In the homes of the wealthy, the rooms of the female members were blind, without windows or doors, open only to the jaunting of intimate members of the family. Thus was morality maintained and chastity defended. But since Olivia Presteign was herself blind to normal sight, she could not jaunte... Olivia Presteign was a glorious albino... she could see in the infrared only, from 7,500 angstroms to one millimeter wavelengths. She saw heat waves, magnetic fields, radio waves, radar, sonar, and electromagnetic fields.
• a scattering of society notables this morning. There was a Sears-Roebuck, a Gillet, young Sidney Kodak who would one day be Kodak of Kodak, a Houbigant, Buick of Buick, and R. H. Macy XVI, head of the powerful Saks-Gimbel clan... As men climbed the social ladder, they displayed their position by their refusal to jaunte. The newly adopted into a great commercial clan rode an expensive bicycle. A rising clansman drove a small sports car.
• * the tedious ceremony of swearing in the 497th Mr. Presto in the hierarchy of Presteign Prestos who managed the shops in the Presteign retail division. Until recently the man had had a face and body of his own. Now, after years of cautious testing and careful indoctrination, he had been elected to join the prestos... After six months of surgery and psycho-conditioning, he was identical with the other 496 Mr. Prestos and to the idealized portrait of Mr. Presto
• Spaceships, like sailing vessels, were never designed to support their own weight unaided against the drag of gravity. Normal terran gravity would crack the spine of a spaceship like an eggshell. The ships were built in deep pits, standing vertically in a network of catwalks and construction grids, braced and supported by anti-gravity screens. They took off from similar pits, riding the anti-gray beams upward like motes mounting the vertical shaft of a searchlight until at last they reached the Roche Limit and could thrust with their own jets.
• * For two hundred years the IPAF had entrusted its intelligence work to the Chinese who, with a five thousand-year history of cultivated subtlety behind them, had achieved wonders. Captain Y’ang-Yeovil was a member of the dreaded Society of Paper Men, an adept of the Tientsin Image Makers, a Master of Superstition, and fluent in the Secret Speech. He did not look Chinese.
• * He opened with a flanking movement. 'Are we related anywhere within fifteen degrees of consanguinity?' he asked Bunny in the Mandarin dialect. 'I am of the house of the learned Meng-Tse whom the barbarians call Mencius.'
  'Then we are hereditary enemies,' Bunny answered in faltering Mandarin. 'For the formidable ancestor of my line was deposed as governor of Shantung in 342 B.C. by the earth pig Meng-Tse.'
  'With all courtesy I shave your ill-formed eyebrows,' Y'ang-Yeovil said.
  'Most respectfully I singe your snaggle teeth.' Bunny laughed.
• 'Oh yes. Didn't you know one of your five hundred Prestos was an agent of ours? That's odd. We took it for granted you'd find out and went ahead with a confusion operation.'.. 'That's the basic weakness in routine intelligence procedure; you start finessing before finesse is required.'
• No war materiel has ever made that much difference.'
  'No? I cite the fission bomb of 1945. I cite the Null-G anti-gravity installations of 2022. Talley's All-Field Radar Trip Screen of 2194. Material can often make the difference, especially when there's the chance of the enemy getting it first?'
  'There's no such chance now.'
  'Thank you for admitting the importance of PyrE.'
• there was an accident at Tycho Sands, and the fission blast that should have killed him did not. Instead it turned him dangerously radioactive; it turned him 'hot'; it transformed him into a twenty-fourth century 'Typhoid Mary.'.. He could not occupy any room other than his own for more than thirty minutes a day. Commanded and paid by the IP to isolate himself, Dagenham had abandoned research and built the colossus of Dagenham Couriers, Inc.
• * Her name was Jisbella McQueen. She was hot-tempered, independent, intelligent, and she was serving five years of cure in Gouffre Martel for larceny. Jisbella gave Foyle a cheerfully furious account of her revolt against society.
  'You don't know what jaunting's done to women, Gully. It's locked us up, sent us back to the seraglio.'
  'What's seraglio, girl?'
  'A harem. A place where women are kept on ice. After a thousand years of civilization (it says here) we're still property. Jaunting's such a danger to our virtue, our value, our mint condition, that we're locked up like gold plate in a safe...
  And Jiz went on to describe the lurid details of her revolt: the Temper Racket, the Cataract Racket, the Honeymoon and Obituary Robs, the Badger Jaunte, and the Glim-Drop.
  'Who's illiterate?' 'You are,' Jisbella answered firmly. 'I have to talk gutter a you half the time, me.' 'I can read and write.' 'And that's about all… which means that outside of brute strength you'll be useless.'
• 'Smell this,' he laughed. 'Taste it. It's grass, Jiz. Earth and grass. We must be out of Gouffre Martel.'
• 'We tried makeup but that didn't work. The damned tattooing showed through. Then I bought a dark skin-surrogate and sprayed it on.'... 'No,' Jiz said angrily. 'You have to keep your face quiet or else the surrogate cracks and peels. Foyle couldn't control himself.
• I don't think I missed a spot of pigment. You may admire my skill, Jisbella also my sagacity. I'm going to back Foyle's salvage trip.' 'What?' Quatt laughed. 'You taking a thousand-to-one gamble, Baker? I thought you were smart.' 'I am. The pain was too much for him and he talked under the anesthesia. There's twenty million in platinum bullion aboard the 'Nomad.''
• * They skidded around a corner into a shrieking mob of post-operative patients, bird men with fluttering wings, mermaids dragging themselves along the floor like seals, hermaphrodites, giants, pygmies, two-headed twins, centaurs, and a mewling sphinx. They clawed at Jisbella and Quatt in terror... Baker's temporal freaks…subjects with accelerated time sense, darting about the ward with the lightning rapidity of humming birds and emitting piercing batlike squeals.
• 'To Sam's ship.' Foyle thrust his big hand before Jisbella's eyes; a bunch of radiant keys lay in his palm. 'I took his keys. Come on.' 'He gave them to you?' 'I took them off his body.' 'Ghoul!' She began to laugh. 'Liar… Lecher… Tiger… Ghoul. The walking cancer…Gully Foyle.'
• * To three acrobats wearing powdered wigs, four flamboyant women carrying pythons, a child with golden curls and a cynical mouth, a professional duellist in medieval armor, and a man wearing a hollow glass leg in which goldfish swam, Saul Dagenham said: 'All right, the operation's finished.
• The burning expression on her face transformed Foyle's anger into passion. He enveloped her and buried his new face in her breast. 'Lecher,' Jiz murmured. 'Animal…'
• * And Jisbella, looking at Foyle, cried out in horror. The old tattooing had returned to his face, blood red against the pallor of the skin, scarlet instead of black, truly a tiger mask in color as well as design... 'No. The scars are too deep for graft. You'll never get rid of this stigmata, Gully. You'll have to learn to live with it.'
• 'Listen. Blast it with something explosive. That would act like a rocket jet… give it a thrust.'
  'Yes, I've got that. But then what? How do we get it into the ship, girl? Can't keep blasting. Haven't got time.'
  'No, we bring the ship to the safe.'..
  'Blast the safe straight out into space. Then bring the ship around and let the safe sail right into the main hatch. Like catching a ball in your hat.
• There was no blast; there was no flash. A new crater opened in the asteroid below him and a flower of rubble sprang upward, rapidly outdistancing a dull steel ball that followed leisurely, turning in a weary spin.
• * 'There's no way in, I tell you,' she cried in despair. 'I'm blocked out.' He stared around wildly. Dagenham's men were boarding the hull of the Weekender with the menacing purpose of professional raiders. Dagenham's ship was lifting over the brief horizon of the asteroid on a dead course for him. His head began to spin...  It broke free of Dagenham's boarders, of Jisbella, of warnings and pleas. It pressed Foyle back into the pilot's chair with the blackout of 10 G acceleration, an acceleration that was less pressing, less painful, less treacherous than the passion that drove him. And as he passed from sight there rose up on his face the blood-red stigmata of his possession.
• Commerce obeyed, for this war (like all wars) was the shooting phase of a commercial struggle. But populations rebelled, and draft-jaunting and labor-jaunting became critical problems.
• * But Fourmyle was in the library bludgeoning his librarian over the head with Bloch's 'Des Sexual Leben' (eight pounds, nine ounces) because that unhappy man could produce no text on the manufacture of perpetual motion machines. He rushed to his physics laboratory where he destroyed an expensive chronometer to experiment with cog wheels, jaunted to the bandstand where he seized a baton and led the orchestra into confusion, put on skates and fell into the scented swimming pool, was hauled out, swearing fulminously at the lack of ice, and was heard to express a desire for solitude.
• The operation had cost Foyle Cr 200,000 bribe to the chief surgeon of the Mars Commando Brigade and had transformed him into an extraordinary fighting machine. Every nerve plexus had been rewired, microscopic transistors and transformers had been buried in muscle and bone, a minute platinum outlet showed at the base of his spine. To this Foyle affixed a power-pack the size of a pea and switched it on. His body began an internal electronic vibration that was almost mechanical... Foyle pressed a tooth with his tongue and the peripheral cells of his retina were excited into emitting a soft light.
• The jaunting age had crystallized the hoboes, tramps, and vagabonds of the world into a new class. They followed the night from east to west, always in darkness, always in search of loot, the leavings of disaster, carrion...  They called themselves Jack-jaunters. They were jackals.
• Self-centered, pedantic, single-minded, shallow. Not bribable; too repressed and straitlaced. But repression's the chink in his armor.'
• 'I've got a fortune to spend… never mind how I got it. I've got three months to finish the job. I've learned enough maths to compute the probabilities. Three months is the outside before they figure that Fourmyle of Ceres is Gully Foyle. Ninety days. From New Year's to All Fools... 'I don't know where the hunt is going to lead me… society or slums. I've got to be prepared for both. The slums I can handle alone. I haven't forgotten the gutter, but I need you for society. Will you come in with me?'
• * With him was Robin Wednesbury in a glittering white gown, her slender waist tight in whalebone, the bustle of the gown accentuating her long, straight back and graceful step. <> The black and white contrast was so arresting that an orderly was sent to check the sunburst trademark in the Almanac of Peerages and Patents. He returned with the news that it was of the Ceres Mining Company, organized m 2250 for the exploitation of the mineral resources of Ceres, Pallos, and Vesta.
• 'Why, you actually seem proud. Are you proud of your bad taste?' 'The problem today is to have any taste at all.'
• * 'You ought to travel with a portable inventor, Fourmyle.' 'I've got one. Haven't I, Robin? But he wastes his time on perpetual motion. What I need is a resident spendthrift. Would any of your clans care to lend me a younger son?'
• I've got three leads to the man who gave the order to let me die. Three names. A cook in Rome named Poggi; a quack in Shanghai named Orel; and this man, Forrest.
• 'Analogue. Psychiatric dope for psychotics. Illegal. A twitch has to release himself somehow, revert back to the primitive. He identifies with a particular kind of animal… gorilla, grizzly, brood bull, wolf… Takes the dope and turns into the animal he admires. Forrest was queer for snakes, seems as if.'
• 'No, amused. I didn't kill them; I forced them to kill themselves.'... 'They've been given Sympathetic Blocks. You know about SBs, girl? Intelligence uses them for espionage agents. Take a certain body of information you don't want told. Link it with the sympathetic nervous system that controls automatic respiration and heart beat. As soon as the subject tries to reveal that information, the block comes down, the heart and lungs stop, the man dies, your secret's kept.
• the Villa Borghese in a broad, long sweep, the Spanish Stairs are, have been, and always will be swarming with vice. Pimps lounge on the stairs, whores, perverts, lesbians, catamites.
• For a thousand years Rome has welcomed the New Year with a bombardment… firecrackers, rockets, torpedoes, gunshots, bottles, shoes, old pots and pans. For months Romans save junk to be hurled out of top-floor windows when midnight strikes.
• 'The Burning Man! Look! The Burning Man!' 'But that's Foyle,' Y'ang-Yeovil whispered. For perhaps a quarter of a minute the apparition stood, silent, burning, staring with blind eyes. Then it disappeared.
• The Colas arrived in a band wagon. The Esso family (six sons, three daughters) was magnificent in a glass-topped Greyhound bus. But Greyhound arrived (in an Edison electric runabout) hard on their heels
• Foyle had trained himself to read men, but Presteign's hard, handsome face was inscrutable. Standing face to face, the one detached and compelled, the other reserved and indomitable, they looked like a pair of brazen statues at white heat on the verge of running molten.
• Fourmyle closed the platinum Hunter. 'My address is Old St. Patrick's, New York. There's one thing to be said for the outlawed religions… At least they built churches big enough to house a circus.'
• Foyle looked at her once and lowered his eyes in confusion before the blind gaze that could only see him as electromagnetic waves and infrared light. His pulse began to beat faster; a hundred lightning fantasies about himself and Olivia Presteign flashed in his heart.
• * 'Make it a human war,' she said fiercely. 'You're the first not to be deceived by my looks. Oh God! The boredom of the chivalrous knights and their milk-warm passion for the fairy tale princess. But I'm not like that inside. I'm not. I'm not. Never. Make it a savage war between us. Don't win me… destroy me!'
• 'Me? Never. I've been hunting all my life.' 'You've been running. Haven't you ever heard of Attack-Escape? To run away from reality by attacking it… denying it… destroying it? That's what you've been doing?'... 'From reality. You can't accept life as it is. You refuse. You attack it try to force it into your own pattern. You attack and destroy everything that stands in the way of your own insane pattern.' She lifted her tearstained face. 'I can't stand it anymore. I want you to let me go.'
• He looked at her incredulous face and smiled ruefully. 'It's too bad, girl. If you'd given me this letter two hours ago I'd have kept my word. But it's too late now. I need a Romance Secretary. I'm in love with Olivia Presteign.' She leaped to her feet in a blaze of fury. 'You're in love with her? Olivia Presteign? In love with that white corpse!' The bitter fury of her telesending was a startling revelation to him. 'Ah, now you have lost me. Forever. Now I'll destroy you!'
• 'But you're the cook from the Spanish Stairs! Angelo Poggi!' As an Intelligence Officer, Y'ang-Yeovil was prepared to deal with this crisis. 'Not a cook, madam. I haven't had time to change back to my usual fascinating self.
• Y'ang-Yeovil cocked a sympathetic eye at her. 'What a dirty trick, Miss Wednesbury to be saddled with all the disadvantages of telepathy, and be deprived of all the advantages. I do sympathize. Believe me.'
• 'Yes. I can see a strange pattern over his face… not the usual electricity of nerve and muscle. Something laid over that. It fascinated me from the beginning.'... 'Fantastic… Wonderfully evil.
• 'He thinks he invented it. He remembered it. Geoffrey Fourmyle is the name they use in the megalomania test down in Combined Hospital in Mexico City. I used the Megal Mood on Foyle when I tried to open him up. The name must have stayed buried in his memory. He dredged it up and. thought it was original. That tipped me.'
  'Poor Gully.'
  Dagenham smiled. 'Yes, no matter how we defend ourselves against the outside we're always licked by something from the inside. There's no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.'
• 'What!' Foyle was thunderstruck. 'He's a Skoptsy? You mean after hunting him for a year, I can't touch him… hurt him… make him feel what I felt?' He turned away from the tortured man on the table, equally tortured himself by frustration... . '
• The ancient Skoptsy sect of White Russia, believing that sex was the root of all evil, practiced an atrocious self-castration to extirpate the root. The modern Skoptsys, believing that sensation was the root of all evil, practiced an even more barbaric custom. Having entered the Skoptsy 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... In actuality, the senseless creatures were packed in 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 child wailed; the woman writhed; Foyle fumed. 'Go in! Go in! Get it out of her. Jesus Christ, why does the only telepath on Mars have to be a child? Sigurd! Sigurd, listen to me. Ask her: Did she give the order to scuttle the reffs?'
• * 'This time we picked you up,' a voice said. 'Olivia?' 'Yes.' 'Then it's true?' 'Yes, Gully.' Foyle began to cry.
• 'For being blind,' she said in a smoldering voice. 'For being cheated. For being helpless… They should have killed me when I was born. Do you know what it's like to be blind… to receive life secondhand? To be dependent, begging, crippled? 'Bring them down to your level,' I told my secret life. 'If you're blind make them blinder. If you're helpless, cripple them. Pay them back… all of them.' ... 'I'm in love with a monster.' 'We're a pair of monsters.'
• What's your revenge but settling your own private account with bad luck? Who wouldn't call you a crazy monster? I tell you, we're a pair, Gully. We couldn't help falling in love.' <> He was stunned by the truth of what she said. He tried on the shroud of her revelation and it fit, clung tighter than the tiger mask tattooed on his face.
• * 'I've been a tiger all my life. I trained myself… educated myself pulled myself up by my stripes to make me a stronger tiger with a longer claw and a sharper tooth… quick and deadly… ... 'No. I'm not. I went too far. I went beyond simplicity. I turned myself into a thinking creature. I look through your blind eyes, my love whom I loathe, and I see myself. The tiger's gone.'
• Suddenly Presteign began speaking in a low monotone. 'PyrE is a pyrophoric alloy. A pyrophore is a metal which emits sparks when scraped or struck. PyrE emits energy, which is why E, the energy symbol, was added to the prefix Pyr. PyrE is a solid solution of transplutonian isotopes, releasing thermonuclear energy on the order of stellar Phoenix action. It's discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe.'... 'Through Will and Idea,' Presteign repeated. 'PyrE can only be exploded by psychokinesis. Its energy can only be released by thought. It must be willed to explode and the thought directed at it. That is the only way.'
• * 'The most damnable thing that ever happened to a man. I picked up a rare disease called conscience.'... Foyle said grimly. 'That's why I've come to you… for major surgery. The man who upsets the morphology of society is a cancer. The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal. But there are chain reactions. Purging yourself with punishment isn't enough. Everything's got to be set right. ... 'Not yet. Go on. You sound as though you've got ethical growing pains.'
• More than a year ago, Regis Sheffield had been hypnotically fulminated and triggered for this moment. His body had been prepared to respond without thought, and the response was lightning. Sheffield struck Foyle in half a second; temple, throat and groin. It had been decided not to depend on weapons since none might be available.
• 'The Outer Satellites? Shall I spell it for you?'
  'No…' Foyle muttered. 'I might have known. The patriot, Sheffield, an O.S. agent. I should have known. I'm a fool.'
  'You're the most valuable fool in the world, Foyle. We want you even more than the PyrE. That's an unknown to us, but we know what you are.'
• 'Man, you space-jaunted!' Sheffield said savagely. 'You were patched and delirious, but you space-jaunted. You space-jaunted six hundred thousand miles through the void back to the wreck of the 'Nomad.' You did something that's never been done before.
• Ten square miles of Texas flats shook themselves into corduroy. A vast untapped deposit of natural gas at last found a vent and came shrieking up to the surface where sparks from flying stones ignited it into a roaring torch, two hundred feet high.
• In Old St. Pat's nearly a tenth of a gram of PyrE was exposed in Fourmyle's laboratory... Down came towers, spires, pillars, buttresses, and roof in a thundering avalanche to hesitate above the yawning crater of the floor in a tangled, precarious equilibrium. A breath of wind, a distant vibration, and the collapse would continue until the crater was filled solid with pulverized rubble.
• So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became taste, and smell became touch. He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno under Old St. Pat's; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.
• So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became taste, and smell became touch. He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno under Old St. Pat's; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.
• It was the search party from the Couffre Martel hospital, tracking Foyle and Jisbella McQueen by geophone. The Burning Man disappeared, but not before he had unwittingly decoyed the searchers from the trail of the vanished fugitives.
• 'This is bigger than idealism.'    'Nothing's bigger than idealism.'
• 'Life is so simple,' he said. 'This decision is so simple, isn't it? Am I to respect Presteign's property rights? The welfare of the planets? Jisbella's ideals? Dagenham's realism? Robin's conscience? Press the button and watch the robot jump. But I'm not a robot. I'm a freak of the universe… a thinking animal… and I'm trying to see my way clear through this morass. Am I to turn PyrE over to the world and let it destroy itself? Am I to teach the world how to space-jaunte and let us spread our freak show from galaxy to galaxy through all the universe? What's the answer?'
• 'Stop treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open.' Foyle laughed savagely. 'I've ended the last starchamber conference in the world. I've blown the last secret wide open. No more secrets from now on… No more telling the children what's best for them to know. Let 'em all grow up... 'Am I? I've handed life and death back to the people who do the living and dying. The common man's been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us… Compulsive men… Tiger men who can't help lashing the world before them. We're all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we're compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death.
• * '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.'
• 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.
• * 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..

// Neil Gaiman wrote in the introduction to a 1999 edition of the book: "The Stars My Destination is, after all, the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific MacGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief-woman.
// You can no more read the same book again as you can step into the same river.