Short Fiction quotes

This was his room, he thought.

Rooms acquire the personality of the person who lives in them, become a part of him.

This was his world, his own private world, and as such it would be the last to go.

And then the elephant ash tray.

“Oh, well,” said Mr. Chambers, “I never did like that very well.”

Now as he sat there it didn’t seem queer to be without the table or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal. Something one could expect to happen.

He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.

The clock hadn’t stopped.

There was a tingling sensation in his feet.

Scott stiffened, ears tensed as the code sputtered across millions of miles. But it was the same old routine. The same old message, repeated over and over again … the same old warning hurled out from the ruddy planet.

“No. No. No come. Danger.”

Scott turned toward the window, started up into the sky at the crimson eye of Mars.

Hugh stared across the sand at the little glimmer of white in the shadow of the building.

“We’ll make another cross,” he said.

The Martians hadn’t wanted them to come. That much, at least, was clear. But having gotten here, the Martians had no intention of letting them return to Earth again.

“I have to make another cross,” he said.

Far overhead, in the depths of space, twinkled the blue planet whose life would never know the slavery of the emotionless race of a dying world.

Men and ships with the alien dust of far off planets still clinging to their skins. Ships with strange marks and scars upon them, and men with strange words upon their tongues.

Thirty years of reducing high adventure to cold figures.

Thirty years of recording strange cargoes and stranger tales into accounts. Thirty years of watching through a window while rockets, outbound, dug molten pits into the field. Thirty years of being on the edge, the very fringe of life … but never in it.

Thirty years of reducing high adventure to cold figures. Thirty years of recording strange cargoes and stranger tales into accounts. Thirty years of watching through a window while rockets, outbound, dug molten pits into the field.

Thirty years of being on the edge, the very fringe of life⁠ ⁠… but never in it.

Nor could Belmont have guessed or Meek formed in words the romanticism that glowed within the middle-aged bookkeeper’s heart … a thing that sometimes hurt … something earthbound that forever cried for space.

He’d read about that, heard about it. Fear of the loneliness and the terrible depths of space … fear of the indifference of endless miles of void, fear of the unknown that always lurked just at elbow distance.

“Meek,” he told himself, “you should have stayed at home.”

Dawn came shortly, but no such dawn as one would see on Earth. Just a gradual dimming of the stars, a gradual lifting of the blacker darkness as a larger star, the Sun, swung above the peaks.

And he was going to do just that, he promised himself. Although he hoped the next stop would be more peaceable.

Oliver Meek sighed happily⁠—this was the life.

Limped once in a while, of course, and got a few twinges now and then, but that was all. Never had me tied up like this since I left Earth. One of the reasons I never did go back to Earth.

Space is good climate for rheumatiz. Cold but dry. No moisture to get into your bones.

”

The pyramid was built of bottles, hundreds of bottles that flashed and glinted as if with living fire, picking up and breaking up the misty light that filtered from the distant sun and still more distant stars.

Frederick West took a slow step forward, away from the open port of his tiny ship. He shook his head and shut his eyes and opened them again and the pyramid was still there.

Mystery from the first, he thought … beginning and the end. First because the commission was seeking a hormone to effect controlled mutations in the human race. And the race would resent such a thing, of course, so it had to be a mystery.

The human race, West thought bitterly, resents anything that deviates from the norm.

It used to stone the leper from the towns and it smothered its madmen in deep featherbeds and it stares at a crippled thing and its pity is a burning insult. And its fear … oh, yes, its fear!

But the day will come when there are others like me. And there may be even now.

For you can’t tell a mutant by the way he combs his hair, nor the way he walks or talks. He sprouts no horns and he grows no tail and there’s no mark upon his forehead.

But when you spot one, you must watch him carefully. You must spy against him and set double-checks about him. And you must find a place to put him where you’ll be safe from anything he does … but you must not let him know.

But I, he said, I was noticed. That is the crime of mutancy, to be noticed. Like the Spartan boy whose crime of stealing a fox was no crime at all, but whose cries when the fox ripped out his guts were a crime indeed.

I rose too fast, he thought. I cut through too much red tape. I understood too well.

And in governmental office you can not rise too fast nor cut red tape nor understand too well. You must be as mediocre as your fellow officeholders.

And it was, finally, as he had hoped it would be. No one around. A storehouse full of food. Adequate shelter. A shop where he could work. A place guarded by the patrol against unwelcome callers.

Just the place for a man who might be hiding. Just the place for a fugitive from the human race.

There were things to do … later on. Two bodies to be given burial. A screen to be cleaned up and thrown on a junk heap. A few chittering things to be hunted down and killed.

You lived as carelessly and as recklessly as you could and you hoped that you would be lucky and be accidentally killed.

You kept on living and you got tired of living.

“God, how tired a man can get of living!” Andrew Young said.

You kept on living and you got tired of living.

“God, how tired a man can get of living!” Andrew Young said.

John Riggs, chairman of the immortality commission, cleared his throat.

I don’t know even a fraction of them and I listen to them carefully explain a relationship so tangled and trivial that it makes me yawn in their faces.

It’s all new to them and so old, so damned and damnably old to me.

”

And the surface features were little altered from the twentieth century. The rivers ran along familiar paths, the hills and bluffs looked much the same. In this corner of the Earth, at least, 150,000 years had not changed things greatly.

Boyhood dreams, Hudson thought, were wondrous.

It was not often that three men who had daydreamed in their youth could follow it out to its end. But they had and here they were.

He looked at the copy chief.

“Where the hell is Mastodonia?” he asked.

The copy chief shrugged. “Don’t ask me. You’re the brains in this joint.”

“That doesn’t matter now,” said Cooper. “What counts is that he’ll come back. I can feel it in my bones.”

And here’s another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living.

God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind!

And here’s another case, thought Hudson, of hope begging to be allowed to go on living.

God, he thought, I wish I could be that blind!

“Wes is working on it right now,” said Cooper confidently.

He gripped the rifle tighter and went on.

No animal, he told himself, was unkillable.

Half an hour before sunset, he called a halt when they reached a brackish waterhole. The light soon would be getting bad for shooting.

“Whose death?” asked Duncan. “Whose death were you talking of?”

“Why, ours, of course,” said Sipar, and went back to sleep.

Duncan did not see the arrow coming. He heard the swishing whistle and felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it thunked into a tree behind him.

Late in the afternoon, the plain on which they had been traveling suddenly dropped away. They stood poised on the brink of a great escarpment and looked far out to great tangled forests and a flowing river.

It was like suddenly coming into another and beautiful room that one had not expected.

This was new land, never seen before by any Earthman. For no one had ever mentioned that somewhere to the west a forest lay beyond the bush. Men coming in from space had seen it, probably, but only as a different color-marking on the planet.

Duncan pulled the knife from his belt and tossed it. Sipar caught it deftly.

Looking straight at Duncan, with the flicker of a smile upon its lips, the native cut its throat.

He should go back, he knew. Without the tracker, he didn’t have a chance. The odds were now with the Cytha—if, indeed, they had not been with it from the very start.

What a perfect place to set a trap, he thought. One would be looking at the pug marks, never at the space between them, for the space between would be neutral ground, safe to stride out upon.

Oh, clever Cytha, he said to himself. Oh, clever, clever Cytha!

And now he knew what the other trouble was—the great uneasiness. It was the sense of being watched.