Short Fiction quotes

Obviously the Archeologist’s study belonged to an era vastly distant from today.

Familiar similarities here and there only sharpened the feeling of alienage.

The sunlight that filtered through the windows in the ceiling had a wan and greenish cast and was augmented by radiation from some luminous material impregnating the walls and floor. Even the wide desk and the commodious hassocks glowed with a restful light.

Large buildings are torn down to make smaller ones. Machines are broken up and worked into primitive tools and weapons. There is a kind of unraveling or erasing.

A cultural Second Law of Thermodynamics begins to operate, whereby the intellect and all its works are gradually degraded to the lowest level of meaning and creativity.

”

The first policeman shrugged. “If women were to stop wearing masks, in six weeks you wouldn’t know the difference.

You get used to anything, if enough people do or don’t do it.

”

I finally realized that I was not speculating about masks in general, but about what lay behind one in particular.

That’s the devil of the things; you’re never sure whether a girl is heightening loveliness or hiding ugliness.

I pictured a cool, pretty face in which fear showed only in widened eyes. Then I remembered her blonde hair, rich against the blackness of the satin mask. She’d told me to come at the twenty-second hour—ten p.m.

It was very pale, of course, and there weren’t any cosmetics. I suppose there’s no point in wearing any under a mask. The eyebrows were untidy and the lips chapped. But as for the general expression, as for the feelings crawling and wriggling across it—

Have you ever lifted a rock from damp soil? Have you ever watched the slimy white grubs?

I looked down at her, she up at me. “Yes, you’re so frightened, aren’t you?” I said sarcastically. “You dread this little nightly drama, don’t you? You’re scared to death.”

Sometimes a time wind is playful, snatching up an object, sporting with it for a season and then returning it unharmed to its original place. Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds without realizing it.

Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak that it can ripple only the mind.

A very few time winds are like the monsoon, blowing at fixed intervals, first in one direction, then the other. Such a time wind blows near a balancing rock in a valley of red stones in the American Southwest.

He went on, “A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they’ll live forever.

In good times magicians are laughed at.

They’re a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their war rockets.”

“You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest, tossing a ball around?

Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, and then he’s got to toss it to someone else.

When it’s tossed your way, you’ve got to catch it and hold it tight—and hope there’ll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave.”

“You’ll quickly get over that feeling son,” he said. “

The trouble with the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended with just the Nest.

Now it’ll be good to have a real huge world again, the way it was in the beginning.”

That was the trouble; you couldn’t.

Mars’ two tiny moons had simply vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes of astronomy weren’t on them.

Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of rock—the merest cosmic flyspecks—yet they had carried away with them the security of a whole world.

The Colonel leaned toward Theodor and whispered gruffly, “

The Divine Plan. God is a military strategist, naturally.

”

Her husband’s voice, chopping through her mood of terrified rapture, made her heart jump like a startled cat, yet by some miracle of feminine self-control her body did not show a tremor.

Dear God, she thought, he mustn’t see it. It’s so beautiful, and he always kills beauty.

“I’m just looking at the Moon,” she said listlessly. “It’s green.”

“Close the shutters at once, you little fool, and come away from the window!”

“Green as a beer bottle,” she went on dreamily, “green as emeralds, green as leaves with sunshine striking through them and green grass to lie on.”

She couldn’t help saying those last words. They were her token to the face, even though it couldn’t hear.

With those horrid, rattling little volleys, fear cascaded into the room and filled it, smashing like so much colored glass all the bright barriers of words Effie had raised against it.

For no dreams can stand against the Geiger counter, the Twentieth Century’s mouthpiece of ultimate truth.

It was as if the dust and all the terrors of the dust had incarnated themselves in one dread invading shape that said in words stronger than audible speech, “Those were illusions, whistles in the dark.

He looked at her and perhaps his expression softened just a trifle.

“What’s outside,” he said flatly, “is just a little worse than either of you can imagine.” He tapped his temple. “The garden’s all here.”

“You’ve killed it,” she wept. “You’ve killed it in me. You’ve both killed everything that’s beautiful. But you’re worse,” she screamed at Patrick, “because he only killed beauty once, but you brought it to life just so you could kill it again.

The narrow cove was quiet as the face of an expectant child, yet so near the ruffled Atlantic that the last push of wind carried the Annie O. its full length.

The man in gray flannels and sweatshirt let the sail come crumpling down and hurried past its white folds at a gait made comically awkward by his cramped muscles. Slowly the rocky ledge came nearer.

had always been there. And the splotches made by his sneaker on the rock had faded in the hot sun.

There was something very unusual about the quietness of this place. As if time, elsewhere hurrying frantically, paused here to rest.

As if all changes were erased on this one bit of Earth.

Yet when she lifted up her little eyes from the shadows, he had the uneasy feeling that she knew a great deal about him.

The eyes were still those of a domestic animal, but of a wise one that has been watching the house a long, long while from the barnyard.

He asked abruptly, “Do you know anything of a girl around here named Mary Alice Pope?”

He winced, remembering what he had done to Martin and Mary by his blundering infatuation. In his way, he told himself, he had been as bad as the two old women.

He thought of death, and of time, and of love that defies them.

He stepped limpingly into the Annie O. to set sail—and realized that philosophy is only for the unhappy.

He thought of death, and of time, and of love that defies them.

He stepped limpingly into the Annie O. to set sail⁠—and realized that philosophy is only for the unhappy.

Mary was asleep in the stern.

For

Robie was the logical conclusion of the development of vending machines.

All the earlier ones had stood in one place, on a floor or hanging on a wall, and blankly delivered merchandise in return for coins, whereas Robie searched for customers.

Robie scanned the newcomer gravely. His reference silhouettes were not good enough to let him distinguish the sex of children, so he merely repeated, “Hello, youngster.”

Disregarding both remarks, for a good salesman is single-minded and does not waste bait, Robie said winningly, “I’ll bet you read Junior Space Killers. Now I have here⁠—”

“Uh-uh, I’m a girl. He got a polly-lop.”

“Cal Tech,” Ellenby murmured, his eyes growing distant.

“Cal Tech burns and Ozona stands.”

“Ozona stands for the decencies of life,” the fat man grated, “not alphabet bombs and pituitary gas. Its purpose is to save a town, not help kill a world.”

“No difference,” the fat man cut him short.

“Talk to a woman about ideas and pretty soon she gets some.”

His voice became almost kindly. “Look here, if you wanted a woman without getting hitched to her, why didn’t you go to shantytown?”

“A kind of curve,” Ellenby explained. “The locus of the focus of a parabola rolling on a straight line.”

“Locus-focus hocus-pocus!” Madson snorted. “Reducing the wonders of Nature to chalk marks. It’s disgusting.”

Suddenly each tiny drop of dew turned bloodred. Ellenby turned his back on the spiderweb, whipped a crooked little brass tube from an inside pocket and squinted through it.

With yellow eliminated it shows violet, and so on. But finally, just for a moment at the place where it’s going to break, the skin becomes only one molecule thick. Such a mono-molecular layer absorbs all light, hence shows as dead black.”

“Everything’s got a black lining, eh?”

“Black can be beautiful. Here, I’ll do it again.”

“Everything’s got a black lining, eh?”

“Black can be beautiful. Here, I’ll do it again.”

Madson put his hand on Ellenby’s shoulder to steady himself. They were standing hip-deep in water, their bodies still flecked with suds. Their heads were inches from the new bubble. As it burst a voice floated down to them.

“Where’d you ever get so fixated on dirt?” Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.

“I’ve been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,” the Butcher replied airily. “A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.” His eyes became dreamy. “He even ate out of a garbage pail.”

“I don’t know, but it sounds great.”

“I’ve been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,” the Butcher replied airily. “A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.” His eyes became dreamy. “He even ate out of a garbage pail.”

“I don’t know, but it sounds great.”

The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.

He didn’t even squirm as Brute licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically on his mouth.

He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute’s muzzle and murmured softly: “We came, we saw, we conquered, didn’t we, Brute?”

Then his wife spoke, voicing all their thoughts. Her outlook on life gave her a naturally sepulchral voice.

“What’s he doing in there?”

Twenty minutes and at least as many fantastic suggestions later, the Professor glanced again at his watch and nerved himself for action. Motioning his family aside, he mounted the stairs and tiptoed down the hall.

Whatever we do, it will have to be on our own. But to break in on a creature engaged in—well, we don’t know what primal private activity—is against all anthropological practice. Still—”

“Dying’s a primal activity,” his daughter said crisply.

“So’s ritual bathing before mass murder,” his wife added.

“Dying’s a primal activity,” his daughter said crisply.

“So’s ritual bathing before mass murder,” his wife added.

“Please!

“I wonder what the stuff tastes like,” Rose Thinker said out of a clear sky.

“I wonder what taste tastes like,” Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.

Recovering himself, he continued:

Potshelter gulped a large lavender pill and took a deep breath. “Krumbine, a letter turned up in the first-class mail this morning.”

“It is a letter from one person to another person.”

“The flow of advertising has been seriously interfered with. At a modest estimate, three hundred million pieces of expensive first-class advertising have already been chewed to rags and I’m not sure the Steel Helms—God bless ’em!—have the trouble in hand yet.”

“No, just one single person sending to another.” Potshelter’s expression set in grimly solicitous lines. “I can see you don’t quite understand, Krumbine. This is not a sound-tape, but a letter written in letters. You know, letters, characters—like books.”

“Don’t mention books in this office!”

Krumbine drew himself up angrily and then slumped back. “Excuse me, Potshelter, but I find this very difficult to face squarely.

Next morning, he was still using the freak blade, but with a persistent though very slight uneasiness.

Things should behave as you expected them to, in accordance with their flimsy souls, he told himself at the barely conscious level.

Men should die, hearts should break, girls should tell, nations perish, curtains get dirty, milk sour … and razor blades grow dull. It was the comfortable, expected, reassuring way.

Next morning, he was still using the freak blade, but with a persistent though very slight uneasiness. Things should behave as you expected them to, in accordance with their flimsy souls, he told himself at the barely conscious level.

Men should die, hearts should break, girls should tell, nations perish, curtains get dirty, milk sour⁠ ⁠… and razor blades grow dull.

It was the comfortable, expected, reassuring way.

“I was taking some bicarb,” he told his sister. “Thuringer sausage at lunch.”

Sleep refused even to flirt with Ernie, his mind was full of so many things, especially calculations involving the distance between his car and the house and the length of the garden hose.

In desperation, as the white hours accumulated and his thoughts began to squirm, he grabbed up the detective story he’d bought at the corner newsstand.

He selected the thickest book on the shelf, an overpoweringly dull historical treatise in small print. He turned two pages, three, then closed it with a clap and looked at the wall with frightened eyes.

Ernie Meeker had discovered, inside the birthday box that was himself, the first of the Big Gifts.

The trouble was that in that wee-hour, lonely bedroom, it didn’t seem like a gift at all. How would he ever keep himself in books, he wondered, if he read them so fast?

People love them, admire them, and it only makes them uneasy. They have abilities and charms by the bushel—yes, they do, even that man with the wen on his neck—and they only try to hide them. The spotlight turns their way and they goof.

They think they’re running away from failure, but actually they’re running away from success.

”

Simon Grue found a two-inch mermaid in his bathtub.

It had arms, hips, a finny tail, and (here the real trouble began) a face that reminded him irresistibly of Grushenka Stulnikov-Gurevich.

I was one hundred miles from Nowhere⁠—and I mean that literally⁠—when I spotted this girl out of the corner of my eye.

I’d been keeping an extra lookout because I still expected the other undead bugger left over from the murder party at Nowhere to be stalking me.

We didn’t wave or turn our heads or give the slightest indication we’d seen each other as our paths slowly converged. But we were intensely, minutely watchful—I knew I was and she had better be.

Overhead the sky was a low dust haze, as always. I don’t remember what a high sky looks like.

Three years ago I think I saw Venus. Or it may have been Sirius or Jupiter.

Or had she hoped that the sudden noise would throw me off guard? But who would go to the trouble of carrying a Geiger counter for such devious purposes? And wouldn’t she have waited until we got closer before trying the noise gambit?

Think-shmink⁠—it gets you nowhere!

She kicked off the counter with another bump of her elbow and started to edge in toward me faster. I turned the thinking all off and gave my whole mind to watchfulness.

… realized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over, that I’d had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up, and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was, once again, back with the problem of the two urges.

I could try either to kill her or go to bed with her.

I know that at this point the cultural queers (and certainly our imaginary time traveler from mid Twentieth Century) would make a great noise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness of the simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us …

… breakfast, if I’d just had the knowledge that there was a reasonably secure day ahead of me in which there’d be an opportunity for me to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn’t have been irked, or at least being irked wouldn’t have bothered me terribly.

But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlands than a hot breakfast.

Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast, I’d have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettish about her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to try to preserve some mystery about …

But then the second part of what Pop said so made me want to feel pleasantly sorry for myself and laugh at the same time that I forgave the old geezer.

Practically everything Pop said had that reassuring touch of insanity about it.

So it was Alice who said, “Shut up, Pop”—and rather casually at that—and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about which buttons we ought to push, if any and in what order.

Pop squared his eyes at mine. “Are you so fancy that you have to have a sense of guilt, Ray?” he demanded. “Can’t you just see when something’s lousy?

A sense of guilt’s a luxury.

Of course it’s not enough to say you’re sorry—you’re going to have to spend a good part of the rest of your life making up for what you’ve done … and what you will do, too!

“I don’t know for sure,” Pop said. “I’ve made a guess, but I don’t want to tell it now. What I’m getting at, Ray, is that your first thought about anything you find—in the world outside or in your own mind—is that it’s a weapon.”

“Anything worthwhile in your mind is a weapon!” Alice interjected with surprising intensity.

“You see?” Pop said. “That’s what I mean about the both of you. That sort of thinking’s been going on a long time. Cave man picks up a rock and right away asks himself, ‘Who can I brain with this?’

“You see?” Pop said. “That’s what I mean about the both of you. That sort of thinking’s been going on a long time.

Cave man picks up a rock and right away asks himself, ‘Who can I brain with this?’ Doesn’t occur to him for several hundred thousand years to use it to start building a hospital.

”

“You were going to say ‘the afternoon they killed God?’ ” Alice asked him. “You’re right, it was.

They killed God in the kitchen that afternoon.

That’s how I know he’s dead. Afterwards they would have killed me too, eventually, except—”

“Yet,” Alice said after another pause, with just a trace of the old sarcasm creeping back into her voice, “I don’t suppose you think I was right to do it?”

“Right? Wrong? Who knows?” Pop said almost blusteringly.

“Sure you were justified in a whole pack of ways. Anybody’d sympathize with you. A man often has fine justification for the first murder he commits.

No, she didn’t come within a million miles of my libido, but there was another part of me that she was eating at …

If guilt’s a luxury, then I’m a plutocrat.

… eating at until I was an empty shell, until I had no props left, until I wanted to die then and there, until I figured I had to die …

There’s a man in the east who believes all rich people belong to a secret society that’s a lot tighter and tougher than the Mafia and that has a monopoly of power-secrets and pleasure-secrets other people don’t dream exist.

Me, I think the wheels of the world just go.

I decided that forty years ago and I’ve never since seen or heard or read anything to make me change my mind.

He’d either go back to his place in the machine and act out the part set for him, or else he’d hide away like me and live as quiet as he could, not stirring things up.

Like a mouse in a dynamo or an ant in an atomics plant.

(The Professor went to the window and opened it, letting the sour old smoke out and the noises of the city in.)

Dr. Krakatower shook his head and said,

“Thinking gets more expensive every year.”

From the floor came the harsh voice of Igor Jandorf and the shrill one of Bela Grabo raised in anger. Three words came through clearly: “… I challenge you …”

From the floor came the harsh voice of Igor Jandorf and the shrill one of Bela Grabo raised in anger. Three words came through clearly: “… I challenge you …”

Sandra said, “Well, there’s something you can’t build into a machine⁠—ego.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Simon Great.

Sandra said, “Well, there’s something you can’t build into a machine—ego.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Simon Great.

The pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans, but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool.

Dear blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your Shakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague, spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on the black floor of an infinite barroom, what a sweet last view of the Solar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman⁠ ⁠…

Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve breaking around Uranus—and so what!

He shivered to get a little heat and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through Prospero’s bridge telescope.

The star was a twentieth planetary diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed⁠—a glint almost lost in pale green.

That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through the seventh planet’s thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with the time since rim contact.

“Repeat: if we won it.” Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the hammock. “If there was a real victory message they’d push it through, even if the sun’s in the way and it takes three hours to catch us.

People who win, shout.

”

Join the Space Force and See the Stars! Ness, do you know how long it’d take us to reach the nearest star—except we aren’t headed for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand years!”

“That’s a lot of time to kill,” Ness said. “Let’s play chess.”

Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids. Croker said, “Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?”

Each flash was circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought he’d be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a jolt of excitement that made him grin.

With it came a touch on his shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.

“Ambush,” he said. “At least two cruisers.”

But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as dark as those of Moth and Snug.

Grunfeld thought, now he can rest.

Flash the old viriler charm, cootch them up a bit, emphasize the delights of high living, but make sure they’re compatible roommates. You could pick up that two-yard check from Micro at the same time.”

“You’re an immoral money-ravenous wench,” Gusterson said absently, trying to dream of an insanity beyond insanity that would make his next novel a real id-rousing best-vender.

“If that’s your vision of me, you shouldn’t have chewed up the VV mask.”

“Which is bad enough,” Gusterson commented later to Daisy. “But it’d be even dirtier to think of those clock-watching superegos being strapped to kids’ shoulders.

Can you imagine Huck Finn with a tickler, tellin’ him when to tie up the raft to a towhead and when to take a swim?

”

Gusterson did not comment. His face had a rapt expression. “I’ll tell you why your tickler’s so popular, Fay,” he said softly. “It’s not because it backstops the memory or because it boosts the ego with subliminals.

It’s because it takes the hook out of a guy, it takes over the job of withstanding the pressure of living.

See, Fay, here are all these little guys in this subterranean rat race with atomic-death squares and chromium-plated reward squares and enough money if you pass Go almost to get to Go again—and a million million rules of the game to keep in mind.

“Moodmaster’s going to come alive. Ever occur to you that ‘mood’ is ‘doom’ spelled backwards? And then …” He let his voice trail off as he realized that Kester and Davidson and Hazen had made their farewells and were sliding into the distance.

He reminded himself wryly that nobody ever wants to hear an author talk⁠—he’s much too good a listener to be wasted that way.

Let’s see, was it that everybody in the crowd had the same facial expression … ? Or showed symptoms of the same disease … ?

And Pooh-Bah alone had the aura of full conscious thought. Pooh-Bah alone had mana.

It is not good to see an evil legless child robot with dangling straps bossing⁠—apparently by telepathic power⁠—not only three objects of its own kind and five close primitive relatives, but also eight human beings

… and in addition throwing into a state of twitching terror one miserable, thin-chested, half-crazy research-and-development director.

Fifteen minutes later:

“They’re not crazy, they’re just newborn. The ones that were creating a cootching chaos downstairs were like babies kickin’ their legs and wavin’ their eyes, tryin’ to see what their bodies could do. Too bad their bodies are us.”

Ten minutes more: “I gotta do something about it. Fay’s right. It’s all my fault. He’s just the apprentice; I’m the old sorcerer himself.”

“What are you intending to do now?” Daisy asked flatly.

“I’m merely goin’ out an’ save the world,” he told her. “I may be back for supper and I may not.”

Davidson pushed out from the wall against which he’d been resting himself and his two-stone tickler and moved to block the hall. But Gusterson simply walked up to him.

While his companions softly keened a dirge to Horvy and Phipps and quietly mopped up their blood, he frowned and shook his head.

“They oughtn’t to let old ladies carry magnums,” he murmured.

Witherspoon-Hobbs nodded agreement across the front-seat corpse. “They oughtn’t to let ’em carry anything. God, how I hate Feet,” he muttered, looking down at his shrunken legs. “Wheels forever!” he softly cheered.

He turned toward Witherspoon-Hobbs and said with thoughtful satisfaction,

“I like a normal orderly world, where you always have a little success, but not champagne-heady; a little failure, but just enough to brace you.”

Witherspoon-Hobbs was squinting at the next crosswalk. Its center was discolored by a brownish stain ribbon-tracked by tires.

Once when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion.

And the imaginary companion turned out to be me.

Once when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion.

And the imaginary companion turned out to be me.

Well, I’m a pretty nice guy and so having two of me in the ship didn’t seem a particularly bad idea. At first. In fact there’d be advantages of it, I thought.

I looked at the board and noticed that our terminal trip-velocity read fifteen miles a second. My, my.

Finally Jeff said, “That’s right, you have.” And then, just a shade unhappily, “I might have known. You always tell the truth, Joe⁠—you’re perfect.”

The age too. Miss Nefer can’t be a day over forty—well, forty-two at most—but now she looked and talked and felt to my hands dressing her, well, at least a dozen years older.

I guess when Miss Nefer gets into character she does it with each molecule.

That age point fascinated me so much that I risked asking her a question. Probably I was figuring that she couldn’t do me much damage because of the positions we happened to be in at the moment.

But that’s the way it is.

Maybe I’m like Jonah in the whale, reluctant to go outside because the whale’s a terrible monster that’s awful scary to look in the face and might really damage you gulping you a second time, yet reassured to know you’re living in the stomach of that particular monster and not a seventeen tentacled one from the fifth planet of Aldebaran.

It’s really true, you see, about me actually living in the dressing room. The boys bring me meals: