Short Fiction quotes

When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci’s face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not.

Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself.

The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry.

“You are the bravest of the brave, the most skillful of the skilled. All Mankind owes most honor to the Scanner, who unites the Earths of Mankind. Scanners are the protectors of the Habermans. They are the judges in the Up-and-Out.

They make men live in the place where men need desperately to die.

They are the most honored of Mankind, and even the Chiefs of the Instrumentality are delighted to pay them homage!”

Don’t you think I remember what it is to be a man and not a haberman? To walk and feel my feet on the ground? To feel a decent clean pain instead of watching my body every minute to see if I’m alive?

How will I know if I’m dead?

Did you ever think of that, Luci? How will I know if I’m dead?”

“Habermans are the scum of Mankind. Habermans are the weak, the cruel, the credulous, and the unfit.

Habermans are the sentenced-to-more-than-death.

Habermans live in the mind alone. They are killed for Space but they live for Space. They master the ships that connect the earths. They live in the Great Pain while ordinary men sleep in the cold cold sleep of the transit.”

… tell of the Great Pain, which started quietly in the marrow, like an ache, and proceeded by the fatigue and nausea of each separate nerve cell, brain cell, touchpoint in the body, until life itself became a terrible aching hunger for silence and for death?

He was a Scanner. All right, he was a Scanner.

He had been a Scanner from the moment when, wholly normal, he had stood in the sunlight before a Subchief of Instrumentality, and had sworn:

Martel then shouted: “Honorable Scanners, this is judicial murder.”

No ear heard him. He was cranched, and alone.

None the less, he shouted again: “You endanger the confraternity.”

He stood in the cool night air, waiting. Far above him, through a gap in the mist, he could see the poisonous glittering in the sky of Scanners.

The stars are my enemies, he thought: I have mastered the stars but they hate me.

Ho, that sounds Ancient! Like a Book. Too much cranching.

Pinlighting is a hell of a way to earn a living.

Underhill was furious as he closed the door behind himself. It didn’t make much sense to wear a uniform and look like a soldier if people didn’t appreciate what you did.

As he relaxed, the comforting solidity of the Sun, the clockwork of the familiar planets and the Moon rang in on him.

Our own solar system was as charming and as simple as an ancient cuckoo clock filled with familiar ticking and with reassuring noises.

The odd little moons of Mars swung around their planet like frantic mice, yet their regularity was itself an assurance that all was well.

Here there was nothing to fight, nothing to challenge the mind, to tear the living soul out of a body with its roots dripping in effluvium as tangible as blood.

Nothing ever moved in on the Solar System.

He could wear the pin-set forever and be nothing more than a sort of telepathic astronomer, a man who could feel the hot, warm protection of the Sun throbbing and burning against his living mind.

Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes.

Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a light-year or fifty light-years off.

At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set ready and the familiar Solar System ticking around inside his head.

Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for interstellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away.

Dragons. That was what people called them.

To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammer blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds.

Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammer blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending into their minds.

But to the telepaths, they were Dragons.

In the fraction of a second between the telepaths’ awareness of a hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and the impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all living things within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities something like …

Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turn were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did it.

Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reform three-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to star.

The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to sixty to forty in mankind’s favor.

Man and Partner could do together what Man could not do alone.

Men had the intellect. Partners had the speed.

The Partners rode their tiny craft, no larger than footballs, outside the spaceships. They planoformed with the ships. They rode beside them in their six-pound craft ready to attack.

What seemed to be Dragons to the human mind appeared in the form of gigantic Rats in the minds of the Partners.

Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the Partners’ minds responded to an instinct as old as life.

The Partners attacked, striking with a speed faster than Man’s, going from attack to attack until the Rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time, it was the Partners who won.

He even thought he caught the edge of a longing—

A very flattering and yearning thought: What a pity he is not a cat.

Woodley picked up the last stone. He drew what he deserved—a sullen, scared old tomcat with none of the verve of Captain Wow. Woodley’s Partner was the most animal of all the cats on the ship, a low, brutish type with a dull mind.

For a moment, they stared at each other, man squatting, cat standing erect on her hind legs, front claws digging into his knee.

Human eyes and cat eyes looked across an immensity which no words could meet, but which affection spanned in a single glance.

“Time to get in,” he said.