Short Fiction quotes

Rocket Row is the Joy Street of three planets. It’s got neon lights, crummy dives, cheap hotels, and women to match.

Every man who’s ever rode a ship into space knows about Rocket Row. It runs along the far side of Flushing Spaceport, down toward the Sound.

She wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t listen. I walked out of her cabin, locking the door behind me.

Locking a door and forgetting what’s on the other side are two different things.

I went up to the control room and set a course for Titan. Maybe once we got out there, I’d be able to convince her.

The spaceship rested like a crouching bullet in its chamber. As he slid the tubeway door shut behind him, Merssu admired the savage sleekness of its lines once again. Even more, he admired his cleverness in having it built.

A clever man always has a back door.

He crossed the hangar floor unhurriedly, and climbed into the ship.

“Yeah,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.

“A rocket pilot!” His father’s derision hooted through the quiet parlor.

“A ro—oh, no!—a rocket pilot!”

He didn’t live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again—he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died.

But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.

“You hate us!” He thrust his fat hand, its nails bitten down to the quick and beyond, in front of the cringing alien’s eyes.

“You poor, weak, single-minded, ineffectual thing! We hate ourselves!”

The noise and confusion attendant on the dividing of the spoils was an added help; they reached the fringes of the campfire easily.

It was very interesting, the way history had doubled back on itself, like a worm regrowing part of its body but regrowing it in the wrong place.

At one end of the kink—of the fresh, pink scar—was a purulent hell of fire and smoke that no one might have expected to live through. Yet, people had, as they have a habit of doing.

“Oh. What on Earth would you want to measure that accurately for?”

“For getting women out of trailers in a hurry, lad. Now⁠—let’s look for sentries.”

There were two guarding the trailer—men-at-arms from Dugald’s holding, Geoffrey noticed—carrying shotguns and lounging in the shadows.

The Barbarian chuckled. “Oh, no. We’ve got one, all right, or you’d never have had me to worry you.

Nothing we like better than a good, talented enemy.

You know, these people here in the mountains used to be our favorite enemies. But so many of us wound up getting our marks, it just got to be futile. Once you’re in, you know, you’re a full-fledged clan member.

Know him? Yes, I know him⁠—knew him. That was twenty years ago.

Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different schools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him.

The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard.

What did he look like? He looked like a man.

It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school of thought among us that deplored our combativeness;

He might have come from any town on Earth.

Don’t believe the historians too much. Don’t pay too much attention to the Chamber of Commerce plaques. When a man’s name becomes public property, strange things happen to the facts.

It was MacReidie who first found out what he’d done during the war.

“I was at this planet in ’39. I was closer to your home world the year before that,” the stoker said. “I was captain of a destroyer.

If I’d had a cruiser’s range, I would have reached it.

” He looked at the Jek. “Where were you?”

The stoker shrugged. “

Ships are ships, and physics is physics, no matter where you go. I’ll make out.

”

We heard about our stoker, occasionally. He shipped with the Lud, and the Nosurwey, and some people beyond them, getting along, going to all kinds of places.

Pay no attention to the precise red lines you see on the star maps; nobody knows exactly what path he wandered from people to people.

Nobody could. He just kept signing on with whatever ship was going deeper into the galaxy, going farther and farther. He messed with green shipmates and blue ones.

I wonder if it mightn’t have kept my old captain out of that place he died in, finally, if he’d tried it.

So, I don’t know. The older I get, the less I know.

The thing people remember the stoker for—the thing that makes him famous, and, I think, annoys him—I’m fairly sure is only incidental to what he really did. If he did anything. If he meant to.

Then, with a great swing of his arms, he sent the rifle whirling away.

“The wind!” he sighed into the thin air. “I feel the wind.”

He leapt into the air, and sand flew away from his feet as he landed. He whispered to himself: “I feel the ground!”

He stared in tremblant joy at Sollenar’s empty body. “What have you given me?” Full of his own rebirth, he swung his head up at the sky again, and cried in the direction of the Sun:

“Oh, you squeezing, nibbling people who made me incorruptible and thought that was the end of me!”

With love he buried Sollenar, and with reverence he put up the marker, but he had plans for what he might accomplish with the facts of this transaction, and the myriad others he was privy to.

“I think he’s desperate,” I said. “I think he’s learned all he can. He’s learned what the nearest Earthly equivalents to Veldish things are. And he’s learned that all Earth can give him nothing closer. I don’t see how he could do better. Even he.

You cannot make apples of cabbages.

But he wants to get home—you know he wants so much to leave here and get home—and now he’s desperate, and is going to try making a new transporter out of materials nothing like those in the one that broke and marooned him here.”

“The Veld made me and you. Are you dissatisfied?”

He had that trick, Charpantier. If you tried to give him a problem he couldn’t solve, he gave you a greater problem of your own, to add to the one you already carried.

I picked up my bag and followed him up the hill to the Foundation, where the Veld timelessly waited.

And I heard. In my mind’s eye, I saw the Veld use the Earthly transporter, but it was not with my mind’s ear alone that I heard what I heard.

The pot erupts. The stranded man claws back in agony so great he cannot even scream, arms, legs and face smoldering, and jounces on the ground, to lie, to moan, to be a long mindless time dying.

And at the clearing’s edge the little messengers have no one to say what could be done to soothe him.

I’ve come a long, long way to die alone, David Greaves thought as Defiance tumbled through the misty shroud of Venus, hopelessly torn apart by the explosion in her engines.

On the console in front of him, the altimeter was one of the last few meaningful instruments, and it told him there were only a few tortured miles remaining before the ship he had brought this far—had spent his fortune in building when no government …

Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now.

If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers of mankind had waited until the signposts had gone up, the cave bears would still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamed of might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over the Universe.

I’ll live to see my share of that, Greaves thought as he pulled the capsule’s hatch shut and dropped into the special padding that, in theory, would cushion much of the impact. Or else I’ll know I tried.

“

Mayron that is First of Shadows,

” the empty-skinned thing replied proudly, and began to weep great, black tears that soon emptied it, so that the skin drooped down into a huddle on the pave and a black cloud in the shape of a man stood sparkling in the dusk before …

“

In that case, get out of my court and come back when there’s something to do.

”

“Precisely,” Vigil snorted. “

Man worships nothing but himself.

You were a convenient symbol. It did no harm. It may have done some good. Of course, the chuckleheads took it all literally.

Greaves looked from her to her father. “So she believes in me and you do not,” he said to Vigil. “But it may be you’re not entirely sure—and from the looks she gives me, it may be she isn’t, either.” He grinned crookedly. “

Man may have climbed, but I assure you he hasn’t changed.

”