Islands of Space quotes

Beside the table stood a Munson-Bradley integraph calculator which one of the men was using to check some of the equations he had already derived. The results they were getting seemed to indicate something well above and beyond what they had expected.

And anything that surprised the team of Arcot, Wade, and Morey was surprising indeed.

The intercom buzzed, interrupting their work.

It was the light of three hundred million suns seen at a distance of three million million million miles! And it seemed small because there was nothing with which to compare it.

It was an amazingly beautiful thing, that tiny floating disc of light.

Morey floated over to the cameras and began to take pictures.

There was one little group the men looked at before they left the room of death. There were three in it—a young man, a fair, blonde young woman who seemed scarcely more than a girl, and between them, a little child.

They were sleeping, arms about each other, warm in the arms of Death, the kindly Reliever of Pain.

Arcot turned and rose, flying swiftly down the long corridor toward the door.

It gave them a sense of depression greater than that inspired by the vast loneliness of space.

One is never so lonely as when he is with the dead

, and the men began to realize that the original Ancient Mariner had been more lonely with strange companions than they had been in the depths of ten million light years of space.

“Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is,” Wade snorted sarcastically. “How are you going to get out to a point halfway between these two stars when you don’t have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?”

“If Muhammad can not go to the mountain,” misquoted Arcot, “then the mountain must come to Muhammad.”

“What are you going to do?” Wade asked in exasperation. “Beat Joshua? He made the sun stand still, but this is a job of throwing them around!”

“We did it!” said Wade in a hushed voice.

It was almost a shock to realize that this ship had power enough to extinguish a sun!

Arcot and Morey weren’t awed; they didn’t have time. There were other things to do and do fast.

“They had a lot of courage,” said Arcot, looking down at the city as it sank out of sight.

“It doesn’t take one-quarter as much courage to fight a known enemy, no matter how deadly, as it does to fight an unknown enemy force⁠—something that can tear down mountains and throw their forts into the air like toys.”

“Oh, they had courage, all right,” Morey conceded, “but I wish they hadn’t been quite so anxious to display it!”

“Why don’t you try and see?” Fuller asked sweetly.

“I can think of easier⁠—but probably no quicker⁠—ways of committing suicide,” Wade replied.

Arcot laughed and, looking at Torlos, projected the general meaning of the last remarks. Torlos joined them in the laugh.

Wade and the others picked up the thought, and Wade laughed.

“I suppose they use old I-beams to tie up their Christmas presents.”

Arcot held a moment of silent consultation with Torlos, then turned to the others. “We are supposed to follow these men to their city to have some kind of an audience with their ruler, according to Torlos. Let’s get started;

Then, in the blink of an eye, Arcot was floating in the air before him.

“What avails strength against air, Torlos?”

he asked, smiling.

He more than made up for his injuries with the ray he used, and Morey was no mean gunner, either, judging from the work he was doing.

Three ships attempted to commit suicide in their efforts to destroy the Earthmen. They were only semi-successful; they managed to commit suicide.

In trying to crash into the ship, they were simply caught by Morey’s or Wade’s molecular beam and thrown away. Morey actually developed a use for them.

About him had gathered a group of men who began to develop and spread his ideals. As the new philosophy spread across the planet, more and more Nansalians adopted it and began to raise their children according to its tenets.

But no philosophy, however workable, however noble, can hope to convert everyone.

There always remains a hard core of men who feel that “the old way is the best way.” In this case, it was the men whose lives had been based on cunning, deceit, and treachery.

Like any man so effected, he had unconsciously tightened his muscles. His fingers had sunk into the hard plastic of the arm rest on his chair, and crushed it as though it had been put between the jaws of a hydraulic press!

“I’m glad we weren’t holding hands,” said Wade, eyeing the broken plastic.

“I am very sorry,” Torlos thought humbly. “I did not intend to do that. I forgot myself when I saw that planet rushing at me so fast.” His chagrin was apparent on his face.

Like some titanic broom they swept it around at dozens of miles a second, leaping, twisting, smashing ship after ship. Like a snowball, the lump of glowing metal grew with each crash, till a dozen ships had fallen into it.

It was a new broom, and it swept clean!

Then a magnetic beam caught the Ancient Mariner. With a shock, it slowed down at a terrific rate. Then Arcot turned on more power, and simply dragged the other ship along by its own magnetic beam!