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THE STARS MY DESTINATION
by Alfred Bester
PARTi
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the foTests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Blake
PROLOGUE
THIS WAS A GOLDEN ACE, 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 million people swarmed in one of the most
exciting ages ever known, yet minds still yearned for other times, as always.
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 far stars in deep
space; but- "Where are the new frontiers?" the Romantics cried, unaware that
the
frontier of the mind had opened 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, seventy feet removed from
his lab bench.
Copyright (c) Galaxy Publishing Corporation, 1956.
Reprinted by permission of MCA Artists, Ltd.
They put Jaunte out and went into the whys and wherefores of his
instantaneous 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 in 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 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, if necessary. There was no doubt about that.
Twelve psychologists, parapsychologists and neurometrists of varying
