Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester Read Free Book Online Page A

shipyard so we had better -'
     
    `I will attend in person.'
     
    `In person!' Black Rod faltered.
     
    `But we cannot possibly fly to Vancouver in an hour, Presteign. We -'
     
    `I will jaunte,' Presteign of Presteign snapped. Such was his agitation.
     
    His appalled staff made hasty preparations. Messengers jaunted ahead to warn the Presteign offices across the country, and the private jaunte stages were cleared. Presteign was ushered to the stage within his New York office. It was a circular platform in a black-hung room without windows. This masking and concealment was necessary to prevent unauthorized persons from discovering and memorizing its co-ordinates. For the same reason, all homes and offices had one-way windows and confusion labyrinths behind their doors.
     
    To jaunte it was necessary (among other things) to know exactly where you were, and where you were going, or you had no hope of arriving alive anywhere. It was as impossible to jaunte from an undetermined starting point as it was to arrive at an unknown destination. Like shooting a pistol, you had to know where to aim and which end of the gun to hold. But a glance through a window or door might be enough to enable a man to memorize the L-E-S co-ordinates of a place.
     
    Presteign stepped on the stage, visualized the co-ordinates of his destination in the Philadelphia office, seeing the picture clearly and the position accurately. He relaxed and energized one concentrated thrust of will and belief towards the target. He jaunted. There was a dizzy moment in which his eyes blurred. The New York stage faded out of focus; the Philadelphia stage blurred into focus. There was a sensation of falling down, and then up. He arrived. Black Rod and other of his staff arrived a respectful moment later.
     
    So, in jauntes of one and two hundred miles each, Presteign crossed the continent, and arrived outside the Vancouver shipping yards at exactly nine o'clock in the morning, Pacific time. He had left New York at eleven a.m. He had gained two hours of daylight. This, too, was a commonplace in a jaunting world.
     
    The square mile of unfenced concrete (what fence could bar a Jaunter) looked like a white table covered with black pennies neatly arranged in concentric circles. But on closer approach, the pennies enlarged into the hundred-foot mouths of black pits dug deep into the bowels of the earth. Each circular mouth was rimmed with concrete buildings, offices, check-rooms, canteens, changing-rooms.
     
    These were the take-off and landing pits, the dry dock and construction pits of the shipyards. 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-grav beams upward like motes mounting the vertical shaft of a searchlight until at last they reached the Riche Limit and could thrust with their own jets. Landing spacecraft cut drive jets and rode the same beams downwards into the pits.
     
    As the Presteign entourage entered the Vancouver yards they could see which of the pits were in use. From some the noses and hulls of spaceships extruded, raised a quarter-way or half-way above ground by the anti-grav screens as workmen in the pits below brought their aft sections to particular operational levels. Three Presteign V-class transports, Vega, Vestal and Vorga stood partially raised near the centre of the yards, undergoing flaking and replating, as the heat-lighting flicker of torches around Vorga indicated.
     
    At the concrete building marked: ENTRY, the Presteign entourage stopped before a sign that read: YOU ARE ENDANGERING YOUR LIFE IF YOU ENTER THESE PREMISES UNLAWFULLY. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Visitor badges were distributed to the