Short Fiction quotes

Like everything else in Pallas, it was completely underground, with a purely artificial atmosphere. Artificial, in fact, was the word for Pallas.

Everything about it was synthetic; there wasn’t a figment of reality to be found in it.

All that Pallas had to offer visitors was freedom from most of the more pressing laws of the more civilized—and larger—worlds. That, and the Kiddies, the peculiar race that had been found on the small asteroid when the first space-explorers got there.

All that Pallas had to offer visitors was freedom from most of the more pressing laws of the more civilized—and larger—worlds. That, and the Kiddies, the peculiar race that had been found on the small asteroid when the first space-explorers got there.

Everything that Pallas had, it owed to the fact that, in essence, it had nothing.

No minerals worth the cost of extraction; no agriculture; no science; no artifacts; no history. It was so totally useless that the major worlds of the system had declared, “Hands off!”

For that was the rule: no money, out you go and your baggage held by right of a lockout.

Everything on Pallas was operated by the same ruling⁠—cash strictly in advance.

And to make sure that no floaters were left to the dubious charity of the planetoid, there was another standing rule. A law, this time; a duly enacted law of the Palladian legislature and the sole ordinance that was enforced by the foreign-sponsored native authorities.

De Terry shook his head, and looked down again at his tattered, filthy clothes.

“The next blowup is the last blowup,” he said. “The ants come too late, by millions and millions of years.”

He picked up his spade. “I’m hungry again, Dr. Gordy,” he said.

He changed his position, and lay on the floor, and thought of sleeping. But sleep would not come. There was no evading the knowledge that he had wiped out his own race—annihilated them by preventing them from birth, forty million years before his own time.

He was like no other murderer since Cain, Gordy thought, and wondered that he felt no blood on his hands.

There was a signal that he could not perceive, and his guardian ant came forward to him, nudged him outward from the wall.

You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch.

It isn’t the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong⁠—the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.

It wasn’t just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt’s life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn’t come into the office, yet Barth always came in.

It is the things that are just a little bit wrong—the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.

It wasn’t just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt’s life; it was that the wrong things were wrong.

For instance, Barth hadn’t come into the office, yet Barth always came in.

The eyes were open and they were looking at Burckhardt.

There was neither fear nor pain in them, only a pity deeper than the Pit.

She said, through lips that writhed erratically, “Don’t—worry, Mr. Burckhardt. I’m—all right.”

“Poor little Burckhardt,” crooned the loudspeaker, while the echoes rumbled through the enormous chasm that was only a workshop.

“It must have been quite a shock for you to find out you were living in a town built on a table top.”

It was the morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.

I—knowing what I was doing, with, as they say, malice aforethought—deliberately shot to death Laurence Connaught.

They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me.

Especially because Laurence Connaught had saved my life.

They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me.

Especially because Laurence Connaught had saved my life.

Well, there are extenuating circumstances. I do not think they would convince a jury.

Laurence Connaught was an honest man and an idealist, I think.

But what would happen to any man when he became God?

Suppose you were told twenty-three words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you?

But what would happen to any man when he became God? Suppose you were told twenty-three words that would let you reach into any bank vault, peer inside any closed room, walk through any wall? Suppose pistols could not kill you?

They say power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And there can be no more absolute power than the twenty-three words that can free a man of any jail or give him anything he wants. Larry was my friend.

Ah, hours and days of exciting preparation! What a round of packing and buying; what a filling out of forms and a stamping of visas; what an orgy of injections and inoculations and preventive therapy!

Merely getting ready for the trip made my pulse race faster and my adrenalin balance rise to the very point of paranoia; it was like being given a true blue new chance to live.

At last I was ready. I stepped into the transmission capsule; set the dials; unlocked the door, stepped out; collapsed the capsule and stored it away in my carryall; and looked about at my new home.

That settled it.

Any time a lit-up cue ball talks to me, I refer the matter to higher authority.

I decided on the spot that I was heading for the precinct house, no matter what the Leopards thought.

He thought of the flat, dark square miles of calcareous ooze outside, under which lay the biggest proved untapped petroleum reserve in the world. Sector Forty-one, it was called on the hydrographic charts.

Perhaps, some day, the charts would say: Muhlenhoff Basin.

The emergency intercom was flickering its red call light pusillanimously. Muhlenhoff calmly lifted the handset off its cradle and ignored the tinny bleat. When you gave an order, you had to leave the men alone to carry it out.

She’d had every advantage—decent Civil Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If anything, she had had a better environment than O’Leary himself, and look what she had made of it.

The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that creates its own environment in which to specialize.

From the moment that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.

The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to weeping and she didn’t even care who heard her anymore. Senseless!

It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless, because noise hides noise.

But then she hadn’t been a prisoner very long.

For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail sentence. How does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and house him, with the bills paid by the state? Lafon’s punishment was that he, as an architect, was through.

Savage tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a criminal. Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the personality.

Chop-chop, and a man’s reputation comes off; chop-chop again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop, and he has lost the respect and trust of his fellows.

Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the personality. Chop-chop, and a man’s reputation comes off; chop-chop again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop, and he has lost the respect and trust of his fellows.

The jail itself isn’t the punishment. The jail is only the shaman’s hatchet that performs the amputation.

If rehabilitation in a jail worked—if it were meant to work—it would be the end of jails.

And who would shortly be getting out.

Any prison is a ticking bomb. Estates-General was in process of going off.

From the Greensleeves, where the trouble had started, clear out to the trusty farms that ringed the walls, every inmate was up and jumping. Some were still in their cells—the scared ones, the decrepit oldsters, the short-termers who didn’t dare risk their early discharge.

The governor nodded. “You’ve got it reversed.

Not the right man for the job⁠—the right job for the man!

We’ve got Schluckebier on our hands, see? He’s been born; it’s too late to do anything about that. He will go to pieces in an emergency. So where do we put him?”

He rehearsed little speeches all the day down U.S. One, Mooney did, and they all began: “

Your Honor, I didn’t know⁠—

”

It was quite apparent that he was not to make a noise.

He had patience⁠—the kind of patience that grows with a diet of thrice-used tea bags and soggy crackers.

He waited.

Get rid of this clown from the future, he thought contentedly; meet the Nexus Point instead of Harse and there was the future, ripe for the taking! He knew where the rescuers would be—and, above all, he knew how to talk.

Every man has one talent and Mooney’s was salesmanship.

All the years wasted on peddling dime-store schemes like frozen-food plans! But this was the big time at last, so maybe the years of seasoning were not wasted, after all.

The look from those pale eyes was anything but a look of trust, but Harse didn’t say anything.

He stared about with an expression of detached horror, like an Alabama gentlewoman condemned to walk through Harlem.

And over the wall they went.

What they did, it doesn’t last forever. It lasts for two years and then it wears off. That’s long enough, you see, because that gets you to Mars and back; and it’s plenty long enough, in another way, because it’s like a straitjacket.

You know how to make a baby cry? Hold his hands. It’s the most basic thing there is.

What they did to us so we couldn’t kill each other, it was like being tied up, like having our hands held so we couldn’t get free. Well. But two years was long enough. Too long.

“He’ll be here.” I didn’t have to tell her how I knew. But I knew.

I wasn’t the only one who spent his time at the border of his assigned area, looking across the river or staring across a state line, knowing that somebody was on the other side.

I knew. You fight a war and you don’t have to guess that the enemy might have his troops a thousand miles away from the battle line. You know where his troops will be. You know he wants to fight, too.

“You would be if you—” I started, and then I stopped. Arthur’s feelings were delicate enough already.

I mean suppose that all you had left of what you were born with was a brain in a kind of sardine can, wouldn’t you be sensitive?

Well, Arthur was more sensitive than you would be, believe me.

I said, in a tone that showed as much deep hurt as I could manage: “

Sir, what could go wrong?

”

The changes were such that the forty-fifth such sun looked down on a shrinking human race that could not muster up a hundred million.

A frustrated man drives inward; it is the same with a race.

The hundred million that clung to existence were not the same as the bold, vital ten billion.

It had happened here in Wheeling twice within the past two months. Glenn Tropile had seen it happen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and Bronxville.

There is a limit to the pressure that can be endured.

Tropile walked into the baker’s stall and looked down without emotion at the slaughtered baker. The corpse was a gory mess, but Tropile had seen corpses before.

There was no satisfaction in Citizen Boyne; the passions were burned out of him. He politely tendered Tropile a famous aphorism: “

Citizen, the art of living is the substitution of unimportant, answerable questions for important, unanswerable ones.

Come, let us appreciate the newborn Sun.”

The Pyramid saw them come and the Pyramid saw them go—if the Pyramid could be said to “see.” One human being more or less, what matter?

Who bothers to take a census of the cells in a hangnail?

And yet the Pyramid did have a kind of interest in Glenn Tropile. Or, at least, in the human race of which he was a part.

Through signals perceptible to it, the Pyramids had become “aware” that one of its mechanisms was now ready to be plucked—harvested.

The Pyramid’s blood was dielectric fluid. Its limbs were electrostatic charges. Its philosophy was: Unscrew It and Push. Its motive was survival.

Survival today was not what survival once had been, for a Pyramid.

It didn’t have to be spelled out any further.

Sheep can’t mend their own fences.

The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly—he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind—competitive. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior.

“

It’s the world’s cheapest narcotic,

” Haendl snorted.

He let the mind-clearing unanswerable question drift into his mind:

If the sound of two hands together is a clapping, what is the sound of one hand?

Gently he pawed at the question, the symbol of the futility of mind—and therefore the gateway to meditation. Unawareness of self was stealing deliciously over him.

He was there, all of him, but a zombie-Tropile. Bereft of will, emptied of memories. He was a machine and part of a huger machine.

His sex was the sex of a photoelectric cell; his politics were those of a transistor; his ambition that of a mercury switch.

He didn’t know anything about sex, or fear, or hope. He only knew two things: Input and Output.

Nirvana. (The sound of one hand. … Floating oneness.)

Perfection is completed; by adding to it, it is destroyed.

Duality struck like a thunderbolt. Oneness shattered.

No crawling child in a playpen was more helplessly confined than Tropile and Alla Narova and the others.

And yet no human being had ever been more free.

Regard that imbecile servant of Everyman, the thermostat.

If Everyman’s house stays too hot or too cold, the man swears at the lackwit switch and maybe buys a new one to plug in. But he never, never thinks that his thermostat might be plotting against him.

Thermostat : Man = Man : Pyramid. Only that and nothing more.

It was not in the nature of a Pyramid to think that its Components, once installed, could reprogram themselves. No Component ever had. (But before Glenn Tropile, no Component had been Wolf.)

Tropile reached out from his floating snowflake and went where he wished—anywhere within the binary planet; to the brooding Pyramid on Earth; through the Eyes, wherever he chose on Earth’s surface.

Physically, he was scarcely able to move a muscle. But, oh, the soaring range of his mind and vision!

Citizen Germyn was past shock, but just the same it was uncomfortable to be in a room with several dozen other persons, all of them naked. Uncomfortable. Once it would have been brain-shattering. For a Citizen to see his own Citizeness unclothed was gross lechery.

And he struck mighty blows.

The weakness of a network that reaches everywhere is that it is everywhere vulnerable.

If a teletype repeater in Omaha garbles a single digit, printing units in Atlanta and Bangor will type out errors. Tropile, by striking at the Pyramids’ net at a thousand points, garbled their communications and made them nearly useless.

“

It was like being a god, Gala! I swear, there’s no feeling like it.

I mean it’s like—well, maybe if you’d just had a baby, and invented fire, and moved a mountain, and transmuted lead into gold—maybe if you’d done all of those things, then you might have some idea.

He stared at her; she nodded. “You want to go back,” she said, without stress. “You don’t want to stay here with me, do you? You want to go back into that tub of soup again and float like a baby.

You don’t want to have babies⁠—you want to be one.

”

McCray was beginning to feel more confident.

It was astonishing how a little light made an impossible situation bearable, how quickly his courage flowed back when he could see again.

He stood still, thinking. Item, a short time ago—subjectively it seemed to be minutes—he had been aboard the Jodrell Bank with nothing more on his mind than completing his check-sighting and meeting one of the female passengers for coffee.

The suit and the microphone were clear enough in the pinkish glimmer; but the hand—his own hand, cupped to hold the microphone—he had not seen at all. Nor his arm. Nor, in one fleeting moment of study, his chest.

McCray could not see any part of his own body at all.

Someone was watching Herrell McCray, with the clinical fascination of a biochemist observing the wigglings of paramecia in a new antibiotic—and with the prayerful emotions of a starving, shipwrecked, sailor, watching the inward bobbing drift of a wave-born cask that may contain food.