Death's My Destination

(Gulliver Foyle, common sailor, has been living in an airtight tool locker for six months.  He has no memory of how he got there.  He frequently has to pump a patched spacesuit with air and comb the wreckage of the ship to find oxygen, water and food.  The SS Nomad has been destroyed by some act of war.  Gully is at the end of his rope.  He has left the tool locker to search for food, the suit will hold 5 minutes of air and no more. Then he sees a ship).

 He gave the approaching spaceship one pleading look, then shot down to the tool locker and pumped his suit full.  He mounted to the control bridge. Through the starboard observation port he saw the spaceship, stern rockets still flaring, evidently making a major alteration in course, for it was bearing down on him very slowly.  On the panel marked FLARES, Foyle pressed the DISTRESS button. There was a three-second pause during which he suffered. Then white radiance blinded him as the distress signal went off in three triple bursts, nine prayers for help. Foyle pressed the button twice again, and twice more the flares flashed in space while the radioactives incorporated in their combustion set up a static howl that must register on any waveband of any receiver.

  The stranger's jets cut off. He had been seen. He would be saved. He was reborn. He exulted.
  Foyle darted back to his locker and replenished his spacesuit again. He began to weep. He started to gather his possessions . . . a faceless clock which he kept wound just to listen to the ticking, a lug wrench with a hand-shaped handle which he would hold in lonely moments, an egg-sliver upon whose wires he would pluck primitive tunes . . . He dropped them in his excitement, hunted for them in the dark, then began to laugh at himself.   He filled his spacesuit with air once more and capered back to the bridge. He punched a flare button labeled: RESCUE. From the hull of the Nomad shot a sunlet that burst and hung, flooding miles of space with a harsh white light.  He punched a flare button labeled: RESCUE. From the hull of the Nomad shot a sunlet that burst and hung, flooding miles of space with a harsh white light.
  'Sweet, sister,' Foyle crooned. 'Baby angel, fly away home with me.' The ship came abreast of Foyle, illuminated ports along its side glowing with friendly light, its name and registry number clearly visible in illuminated figures on the hull: Vorga-T: 1339. 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, takeoff 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.
  'You pass me by,' he said with slow mounting fury. 'You leave me rot like a dog. You leave me die, Vorga . . . Vorga-T: 1339, No. I get out of here, me. I follow you, Vorga. I find you, Vorga. I pay you back, me. I rot you. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you deadly.'
  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.
  'Vorga, I kill you deadly.' He did what the cipher could not do; he rescued himself.

The Star's My Destination.  Alfred Bester, 1956

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation.

Deepest space my dwelling place,

The Stars my destination.

 Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man; but now he was adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, and the key to his awakening was in the lock. Presently it would turn and open the door to holocaust.

 An extremely good artist took my pencil drawing of Gulliver Foyle hitting the distress signals aboard the wrecked Nomad and really did something with it, I am beyond astonished at the difference this makes to the picture.  I am forbidden to mention his name but I am very, very grateful.
Merci beaucoup monsieur!

 The same scene as drawn by Howard Chaykin, 1979-

 Vorga, I kill you deadly.