Four-Day Planet quotes

At least, they stayed alive.

There are now twenty-odd thousand of us, and while we are still very poor, we are very tough, and we brag about it.

There were about two thousand people—ten percent of the planetary population—on the wide concrete promenade around the spaceport landing pit.

Hallstock glanced over in my direction and said something to Ravick. Ravick gave a sneering laugh, and then he crushed out the cigarette he was smoking on the palm of his left hand. That was a regular trick of his. Showing how tough he was.

Dad says that when you see somebody showing off, ask yourself whether he’s trying to impress other people, or himself.

I wondered which was the case with Steve Ravick.

I started to burn on that. I get it all the time, and it burns me all the time, but worst of all on the job. Maybe I am only going-on-eighteen, but I’m doing a man’s work, and I’m doing it competently.

“Well, they grow up young on Fenris, Mr. Murell,” Captain Marshak earned my gratitude by putting in. “Either that or they don’t live to grow up.”

Murell unhooked his memophone and repeated the captain’s remark into it. Opening line for one of his chapters. Then he wanted to know if I’d been born on Fenris. I saw I was going to have to get firm with Mr. Murell, right away.

“You drink Baldur honey-rum, don’t you, Bish?” he said, pawing among the bottles in the liquor cabinet next to the refrigerator. “I’m sure I have a bottle of it. Now wait a minute; it’s here somewhere.”

When Dad passes on and some medium claims to have produced a spirit communication from him, I will not accept it as genuine without the expression: “Now wait a minute; it’s here somewhere.”

Bish wanted to know what I was fixing for myself, and I told him.

“Tell the truth, Walt, neither did I,” he admitted. “

Lynch law is a horrible thing; don’t make any mistake about that. But there’s one thing more horrible, and that’s no law at all.

And that is the present situation in Port Sandor.

And before he goes, we can have him make an audiovisual for the ’cast, telling everybody who he is and announcing the price he’s offering. We’ll put that on the air. Get enough publicity, and Steve Ravick won’t dare do anything to him.”

Publicity, I thought, is the only weapon Dad knows how to use.

He thinks it’s invincible. Me, I wouldn’t bet on what Steve Ravick wouldn’t dare do if you gave me a hundred to one. Ravick had been in power too long, and he was drunker on it than Bish Ware ever got on Baldur honey-rum.

He thinks it’s invincible. Me, I wouldn’t bet on what Steve Ravick wouldn’t dare do if you gave me a hundred to one. Ravick had been in power too long, and he was drunker on it than Bish Ware ever got on Baldur honey-rum.

As an intoxicant, rum is practically a soft drink beside power.

“Well, do you think Ravick’s gotten onto Murell yet?” Oscar said. “We kept that a pretty close secret. Joe and I knew about him, and so did the Mahatma and Nip Spazoni and Corkscrew Finnegan, and that was all.”

I nodded, feeling very badly. Four and a half hours had been his limit.

Well, sometimes a ninety percent failure is really a triumph; after all, it’s a ten percent success.

Bish had gone four and a half hours without taking a drink. Maybe the percentage would be a little better the next time. I was surely old enough to stop expecting miracles.

“What do you think?” Joe asked generally. “I think Mr. Murell’s stated it correctly.”

“There is no death,” Cesário said. “Death is only a change, and then more of life. I don’t care what you do.”

“What have we got to lose?” somebody else asked. “We’re broke and gambling on credit now.”

The fact that Bish had started the search for the Javelin that had saved our lives didn’t alter the opinion Joe had formed long ago that Bish was just a worthless old souse.

Joe’s opinions are all collapsium-plated and impervious to outside influence.

I got Bish off to one side as we were going into the editorial room.

“Well, this isn’t my party,” Glenn Murell said, “but I’m too much of a businessman to see how watching somebody kick on the end of a rope is worth four million sols.”

“Four million sols,” Bish said, “and wondering, the rest of your lives, whether it was justice or just murder.”

The Buddhist priest looked at him, a trifle startled. After all, he was the only clergyman in the crowd; he ought to have thought of that, instead of this outrageous mock-bishop.

“Better leave that, Walt,” he said. “You don’t want to get into any shooting.”

Logical, I thought. If you aren’t prepared for something, it just won’t happen.

There’s an awful lot of that sort of thinking going on. As I remember my Old Terran history, it was even indulged in by governments, at one time. None of them exists now.

“Well, stay out of any fighting. Your job’s to get the news, not play hero in gun fights.

I’m no hero; that’s why I’m sixty years old. I never knew many heroes that got that old.

”

“I won’t,” I promised.

“I’m kind of particular where I spit.”

Things must be looking pretty rough around Municipal Building, I thought. Maybe Mort’s afraid the people will start running Fenris again, after this. He might even be afraid there’d be an election.

“Yes,” Oscar said, “and even aside from that, that building was built with our money.

Let’s don’t burn the house down to get rid of the cockroaches.

”

“I know, Walt,” he said. “

But you can’t measure everything in barrels of whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax.

”

“I know, Walt,” he said. “But you can’t measure everything in barrels of whale oil. Or skins of tallow-wax.”

Which was one of those perfectly true statements which are also perfectly meaningless.

I gave up. My job’s to get the news, not to make it. I wondered if that meant anything, either.

One man, and one combat car, against five thousand, with twenty-odd guns and close to a hundred machine guns.

He’d last about as long as a pint of trade gin at a Sheshan funeral.

The only thing was, before he and the crew of the combat car were killed, they’d wipe out about ten or fifteen of our vehicles and a couple of hundred men, and they would be the men and vehicles in the lead.

Mobs are a little different from soldiers, and our Rebel Army was still a mob.

Mobs don’t like to advance into certain death, and they don’t like to advance over the bodies and wreckage of their own forward elements.

Neither do soldiers, but soldiers will do it. Soldiers realize, when they put on the uniform, that some day they may face death in battle, and if this is it, this is it.

“Well, Mr. Ware is a Terran Federation Executive Special Agent,” Fieschi said. “Captain Courtland and I have known that for the past five years. As far as I know, nobody else was informed of Mr. Ware’s position.”

After that, you could have heard a gnat sneeze.

Everybody knows about Executive Special Agents. There are all kinds of secret agents operating in the Federation—Army and Navy Intelligence, police of different sorts, Colonial Office agents, private detectives, Chartered Company agents.