Short Fiction quotes

He examined both hands closely. An instant later, he had sat up in bed and thrown off the covers, partially removing his pajamas and inspecting as much of his body as was visible.

It was the smooth body of a little boy.

That was ridiculous. He was a man of forty-three; an army officer, a chemist, once a best-selling novelist. He had been married, and divorced ten years ago. He looked again at his body. It was only twelve years old. Fourteen, at the very oldest.

Now, suppose, since his environment were not an illusion, everything else were? Suppose all these troublesome memories were no more than a dream? Why, he was just little Allan Hartley, safe in his room on a Sunday morning, badly scared by a nightmare!

Too much science fiction, Allan; too many comic books!

That was a wonderfully comforting thought, and he hugged it to him contentedly. It lasted all the while he was buttoning up his shirt and pulling on his pants, but when he reached for his shoes, it evaporated.

“Morning, son. You’re up early. Going to Sunday school?”

Now there was the advantage of a father who’d cut his first intellectual tooth on Tom Paine and Bob Ingersoll; attendance at divine services was on a strictly voluntary basis.

“Why, I don’t think so; I want to do some reading, this morning.”

The Potsdam Conference had just ended. There were still pictures of the B-25 crash against the Empire State Building, a week ago Saturday. And Japan was still being pounded by bombs from the air and shells from offshore naval guns.

Why, tomorrow, Hiroshima was due for the Big Job! It amused him to reflect that he was probably the only person in Williamsport who knew that.

On the way home, a boy, sitting on the top step of a front porch, hailed him. Allan replied cordially, trying to remember who it was. Of course; Larry Morton! He and Allan had been buddies.

That went over all right.

Anybody knew that there was no rational accounting for the vagaries of the adult mind, and no appeal from adult demands.

The prospect of company at the Hartley home would keep Larry away, that afternoon. He showed his disappointment.

That went over all right. Anybody knew that there was no rational accounting for the vagaries of the adult mind, and no appeal from adult demands. The prospect of company at the Hartley home would keep Larry away, that afternoon. He showed his disappointment.

“Aw, jeepers creepers!” he blasphemed euphemistically.

“Mebbe t’morrow,” Allan said. “If I c’n make it. I gotta go, now; ain’t had breakfast yet.” He scuffed his feet boyishly, exchanged so-longs with his friend, and continued homeward.

It had been made before: against the astronomy of Copernicus, and the geography of Columbus, and the biology of Darwin, and the industrial technology of Samuel Colt, and the military doctrines of Charles de Gaulle.

Today’s common sense had a habit of turning into tomorrow’s utter nonsense.

What he needed, right now, but bad, was a theory that would explain what had happened to him.

“Yes. You find the same idea in Jurgen too,” Allan said. “

You know, I’m beginning to wonder if Cabell mightn’t have known something he didn’t want to write.

”

“

Well, time does appear to pass. So does the landscape you see from a moving car window.

I’ll suggest that both are illusions of the same kind. We imagine time to be dynamic, because we’ve never viewed it from a fixed point, but if it is totally present, then it must be static, and in that case, we’re moving through time.”

And don’t say, ‘What’s that?’ Teacher doesn’t know. But we’re only conscious of one moment; the illusory now. This is ‘now,’ and it was ‘now’ when you asked that question, and it’ll be ‘now’ when I stop talking, but each is a different moment.

We imagine that all those nows are rushing past us. Really, they’re standing still, and our consciousness is whizzing past them.

”

Blake Hartley whistled softly. “And that’s going to happen in thirty years! You know, son, if I were you, I wouldn’t like to have to know about a thing like that.” He looked at Allan for a moment. “

Please, if you know, don’t ever tell me when I’m going to die.

”

lines of alternate probabilities. Something like William Seabrook’s witch-doctor friend’s Fan-Shaped Destiny. When I brought memories of the future back to the present, I added certain factors to the causal chain. That set up an entirely new line of probabilities.

On no notice at all, I stopped a murder and a suicide. With thirty years to work, I can stop a world war.

I’ll have the means to do it, too.”

It had been twenty minutes since he had backed the jeep into the barn, on that distant other timeline; the same delicate lines of white cirrus were etched across the blue above.

The constancy of the weather, even across two hundred thousand parayears of perpendicular time, never failed to impress him.

The long curve of the mountains was the same, and they were mottled with the same autumn colors, but where the little village of Rutter’s Fort stood on that other line of probability, the white towers of an apartment-city rose—the living quarters of the plant …

“We have a monument, at Paratime Police Headquarters, in Dhergabar, bearing the names of our own personnel who didn’t make it back.

It’s a large monument; over the past ten thousand years, it’s been inscribed with quite a few names.

”

Tortha Karf’s expression did not alter; it merely grew more intense.

He used one of the short, semantically ugly terms which serve, in place of profanity, as the emotional release of a race that has forgotten all the taboos and terminologies of supernaturalistic religion and sex-inhibition.

“You’re sure of this, of course.” It was less a question than a statement.

trying to prevent panics and disturbances and dislocations of local economy as a result of our operations; trying to keep out of outtime politics—and, at all times, at all costs and hazards, by all means, guarding the secret of paratime transposition.

Sometimes I wish Ghaldron Karf and Hesthor Ghrom had strangled in their cradles!

”

Her husband contributed: “

His idea of Heaven would be a huge research establishment, where he’d be a five-star general, and Galileo, Newton, Priestley, Dalton, Maxwell, Planck and Einstein would be tech sergeants.

”

“Only nine of us, instead of thirteen, and still one is a Judas,” MacLeod said. “

I suppose there’s always a place for Judas, at any table.

”

“But can the process be controlled?” Suzanne Maillard wanted to know. “Can you convert electrons to neutrinos and then to photons in sufficient numbers, and eliminate other effects that would cause compensating atomic and molecular expansion?”

Kato grinned, like a tomcat contemplating the bones of a fish he has just eaten.

“Yes, I can. I have.” He turned to MacLeod. “Remember those bullets I got from you?” he asked.

Sir Neville Lawton gave a strangling laugh. “Oh, my dear Aunt Fanny! And Nayland goes positively crackers on security. He gets goose pimples every time he hears somebody saying ‘E = mc2,’ for fear a Komintern spy might hear him.

It’s a wonder he hasn’t put the value of Planck’s Constant on the classified list.

He sets up all these fantastic search rooms and barriers, and then he drives through the gate, honking his bloody horn, with his chauffeur’s pockets full of top secrets. Now I’ve seen everything!”

“That may be the trouble, Dirzed,” Dallona told him. “

A scientist gets in the way of doubting, and one doubts one’s own theories most of all.

”

“Slightly,” Verkan Vall deadpanned. “

I enjoyed a brief but rather hectic companionate-marriage with her, about twenty years ago.

What sort of a jam’s little Dalla got herself into, now?”

“Oh, chief!” Verkan Vall reproached. “You know better than that! How many times have our people got in trouble on other timelines because they divulged some useful scientific fact that conflicted with the locally revered nonsense?

You show me ten men who cherish some religious doctrine or political ideology, and I’ll show you nine men whose minds are utterly impervious to any factual evidence which contradicts their beliefs, and who regard the producer of such evidence as a criminal who ought to be suppressed.

For instance, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, where I was just working, there is a political sect, the Communists, who, in the territory under their control, forbid the teaching of certain well-established facts of genetics and heredity, because those facts do not fit the …

Marnik looked at him in open skepticism.

Evidently, in his book, where an attractive man and a beautiful woman were concerned, that explanation was never unthinkable.

“The Lady Dallona is a scientist,” Verkan Vall elaborated. “She is not above diverting herself with love affairs, but that’s all they are—a not too important form of diversion. And, if you recall, she had just participated in a most significant experiment:

The Volitionalists spoke of the Statisticalists as “insane criminals” and “underminers of social stability,” and the Statisticalists called the Volitionalists “reactionary criminals” and “enemies of social progress.”

Politicians, he had observed, differed little in their vocabularies from one timeline to another.

This kept up all the while the ship was passing over the Caspian Sea; as they were turning up the Volga valley, one of the ship’s officers came down from the control deck, above.

“And in the latter case, I intend finding out who discarnated her, and send him to apologize for it in person.

People don’t forcibly discarnate my friends with impunity.

”

Harnosh’s version. “And what, exactly, are the political effects you mentioned? Understand, Dr. Harnosh, I am really quite ignorant of any scientific subject unrelated to zerfa culture, and equally so of Terran politics.

Politics, on Venus, is mainly a question of who gets how much graft out of what.

”

They had expected to be able to do so after the forthcoming general elections. But now, social inequality has become desirable: it gives people something to look forward to in the next reincarnation.

Instead of wanting to abolish wealth and privilege and nobility, the proletariat want to reincarnate into them.

” Harnosh of Hosh laughed happily. “So you can see how furious the Statisticalist Party organization is!”

“Marnark of Bashad, did I hear you say that you considered members of the Society as unworthy to negotiate an affair of honor with your friends, on behalf of this nobleman who has been courteous enough to accept your challenge?” he demanded.

Marnark of Bashad’s arrogance suffered considerable evaporation-loss.

His tone became almost servile.

“

And political expediency is subject to change without notice,

” Verkan Vall finished for him. “Have you an airboat?”

Sarnax spat against the door. “In the face of Jirzyn of Starpha!” he said. “And in the face of his zortan mother, and of his father, whoever he was!

Dirzed, do not talk foolishly; one does not speak of betraying betrayers.

” He turned to Verkan Vall. “They have three menservants of the family of Starpha; your Assassin, Olirzon, discarnated the other three. There is one of Prince Jirzyn’s poor relations, named Girzad.

“All you were interested in was learning the facts. Well, as a scientist, that’s all you’re supposed to be interested in. You don’t have to worry about any social or political implications.

People have to learn to live with newly-discovered facts; if they don’t, they die of them.

”

“Last enemy but one,” Verkan Vall corrected. “

They still have one enemy to go, an enemy within themselves. Call it semantic confusion, or illogic, or incomprehension, or just plain stupidity.

Like Klarnood, stymied by verbal objections to something labeled ‘political intervention.’ He’d never have consented to use the power of his Society if he hadn’t been shocked out of his inhibitions by that nuclear bomb.

The old one nodded. “He had a blaster, and I had none.” He indicated the body on the floor. “Zoldy Jarv had no blaster, either, but he tried to stop Hradzka.

See, he squandered his life as a fool squanders his money, getting nothing for it. And a man’s life is not money, Zarvas Pol.

”

The soldier made an impatient gesture. “

Revenge is for fools, like that pack of screaming beasts below. I do not kill for revenge; I kill because dead men do no harm.

”

At first glance he seemed no more than one of the many young gentlemen of the planter class serving in the Confederate cavalry.

But then one looked into his eyes and got the illusion of being covered by a pair of blued pistol muzzles.

He had an aura of combined ruthlessness, self confidence, good humor and impudent audacity.

At first glance he seemed no more than one of the many young gentlemen of the planter class serving in the Confederate cavalry. But then one looked into his eyes and got the illusion of being covered by a pair of blued pistol muzzles.

He had an aura of combined ruthlessness, self confidence, good humor and impudent audacity.

For an instant he stood looking inquiringly at the general. Then he realized what Stuart had said, and the blue eyes sparkled. This was the thing he had almost given up hoping for—an independent command and a chance to operate in the enemy’s rear.

In all, he and his sextet had captured nineteen prisoners and twenty horses.

But Mosby still wasn’t satisfied.

What he wanted was a few more men and orders to operate behind the Union army on a permanent basis.

“I’m going to keep an eye on these people,” Mosby told Beattie. “Gather up as many men as you can, and meet me in about half an hour on the hill above Middleburg. But hurry!

I’d rather have five men now than a hundred by noon.

”

Mosby shook his head, smiling seraphically. “

No, General. He’s captured you. I’m Mosby.

”

It does not appear that Stoughton doubted as much as one syllable of this remarkable set of prevarications.

The Union Army had learned by bitter experience that Stonewall Jackson was capable of materializing almost anywhere.

So he climbed out of bed, putting on his clothes.

Every prisoner taken reasonably close to Army pay day could be counted on for a few dollars, and in each company there would be some lucky or skillful gambler who would have a fairly sizeable roll of greenbacks.

And, of course, there was the sutler, the real prize catch; any Mosby man would pass up a general in order to capture a sutler.

And Northern-manufactured goods filtered south by the wagonload. Many of the Mosby men wore Confederate uniforms that had been tailored for them in Baltimore and even in Washington and run through the Union lines.

Finally, the invaders passed on, the camp on the mountain top was abandoned, the Mosby men went back to their old billets, and the Forty-Third Battalion could take it easy again.

That is to say, they only made a raid every couple of days and seldom fought a pitched battle more than once a week.

The summer passed; the Virginia hills turned from green to red and from red to brown.

In addition to the hangings at Front Royal, Custer was acquiring a bad reputation because of his general brutality to the people of the Shenandoah Valley.

After the battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull would have probably won any popularity contest in northern Virginia without serious competition.

On September 29, Mosby was back with his command; his wound had not been as serious as it might have been for the bullet had expended most of its force against the butt of one of the revolvers in his belt.

A witness was produced to testify that Mosby had been in Washington on the night of the assassination, April 14.

At that time, Stanton was able to produce a witness to almost anything he wanted to establish.

Fortunately, Mosby had an alibi; at the time in question, he had been at Hancock’s headquarters, discussing armistice terms; even Stanton couldn’t get around that.

“

You’re here because my loving nephew and his charming wife can’t wait to see me buried in the family cemetery; they want to bury me alive in that private Bedlam of yours,

” Colonel Hampton replied.

“What the devil?” he asked himself. “Am I going nuts?”

There was a happy little laugh inside of him, like bubbles rising in a glass of champagne.

“Oh, no; I’m really here,” the voice, inaudible but mentally present, assured him. “You can’t see me, or touch me, or even really hear me, but I’m not something you just imagined. I’m just as real as … as Smokeball, there.

“Oh, but you mustn’t be ashamed of that!” the invisible entity told him. “

That’s the beginning of real wisdom⁠—becoming childlike again.

One of your religious teachers said something like that, long ago, and a long time before that, there was a Chinaman whom people called Venerable Child, because his wisdom had turned back again to a child’s simplicity.”

Myra was silent, and Colonel Hampton found himself watching her with interest. Her mouth had twisted into a wry grimace, and she was clutching the arms of her chair until her knuckles whitened. She seemed to be in some intense pain.

Colonel Hampton hoped she were; preferably with something slightly fatal.

Sergeant Williamson’s suspicion that he might be getting religion became a reality, for a time, that winter, after The Miracle.

Arthur, the young Negro who had driven the jeep, had become one of the most solid pillars of the little A.M.E. church beyond the village, as a result. Sergeant Williamson had also become an attendant at church for a while, and then stopped.

Without being able to define, or spell, or even pronounce the term, Sergeant Williamson was a strict pragmatist.

Most Africans are, even five generations removed from the slave-ship that brought their forefathers from the Dark Continent. And Sergeant Williamson could not find the blessedness at the church. Instead, it seemed to center about the room where his employer and former regiment commander lay.

Colonel Hampton relighted his cigar.

“Patton only said ‘pants’ when he was talking for publication,”

he told her, sotto voce. Then he noticed the unsigned commitment paper lying on the desk. He picked it up, crumpled it, and threw it into the fire.

Colonel Hampton sipped his whiskey slowly, then puffed on his cigar. “No, this pair were competent liars,” he replied. “

A good workmanlike liar never makes up a story out of the whole cloth; he always takes a fabric of truth and embroiders it to suit the situation.

” He smiled grimly; that was an accurate description of his own tactical procedure at the moment. “I hadn’t intended this to come out, Doctor, but it happens that I am a convinced believer in spiritualism. I suppose you’ll think that’s a delusional belief, too?”

“Oh, brother!” Dearest was fairly hugging him with delight. “

When bigger and better lies are told, we tell them, don’t we, Popsy?

”

You think these savages dreamed up that six-armed monstrosity, up there, to express their yearning for higher things, or to symbolize their moral ethos, or as a philosophical escape-hatch from the dilemma of causation? They never even heard of such matters.

On this sector, gods are strictly utilitarian. As long as they take care of their worshipers, they get their sacrifices: when they can’t put out, they have to get out.

How do you suppose these Chulduns, living in the Caucasus Mountains, got the idea of a god like a crocodile, anyhow? Why, they got it from Homran traders, people from down in the Nile Valley.

“

I never do, unnecessarily. There are too many necessary chances that have to be taken, in this work.

” Verkan Vall pressed the button on the hand battery. The globe on the floor flashed and vanished. “Yesterday, five paratimers were arrested. Any or all of them could have had door-activators with them.

The six priests of Yat-Zar, it seemed, were already being brought onto the platform by one of Kurchuk’s nobles.

This noble, whose name was Yorzuk, knew a miracle when he saw one, and believed in being on the side of the god with the heaviest artillery.

As soon as he had seen Yat-Zar coming through the gate without visible means of support, he had hastened to the dungeons with half a dozen of his personal retainers and ordered the release of the six captives.

“And from then on, you’ll have all of them eating out of your hand,” Verkan Vall concluded. “You know, this will probably go down in Hulgun history as the Reformation of Ghullam the Holy.

I’ve always wondered whether the theory of the divine right of kings was invented by the kings, to establish their authority over the people, or by the priests, to establish their authority over the kings. It works about as well one way as the other.

”

“Let this be a lesson,” he said. “

Inferences are to be drawn from objects, or descriptions of objects; never from verbal labels.

Do you initial your first name just to see how people react when they meet you?”

Melroy nodded. “ ‘Obsession’ will probably do. ‘Phobia’ would be more exact.

I’m afraid of fools, and the chance that I have one working for me, here, affects me like having a cobra crawling around my bedroom in the dark.

I want you to locate any who might be in a gang of new men I’ve had to hire, so that I can get rid of them.”

“Now, here’s what’s going to happen. Most of the men’ll take the test without protest, but a few of them’ll raise the roof about it.

Nothing burns a moron worse than to have somebody question his fractional intelligence.

The odds are that the ones that yell the loudest about taking the test will be the ones who get scrubbed out, and when the test shows that they’re deficient, they won’t believe it.

The odds are that the ones that yell the loudest about taking the test will be the ones who get scrubbed out, and when the test shows that they’re deficient, they won’t believe it.

A moron simply cannot conceive of his being anything less than perfectly intelligent, any more than a lunatic can conceive of his being less than perfectly sane.

So they’ll claim we’re framing them, for an excuse to fire them. And the union will have to back them up, right or wrong, at least on the local level. That goes without saying.

So they’ll claim we’re framing them, for an excuse to fire them. And the union will have to back them up, right or wrong, at least on the local level. That goes without saying.

In any dispute, the employer is always wrong and the worker is always right, until proven otherwise.

And that takes a lot of doing, believe me!”

And nobody, outside the Department of Defense, knew how much radar and counter-rocket and fighter protection the place had, but the air-defense zone extended from Boston to Philadelphia and as far inland as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

The Long Island Nuclear Power Plant, Melroy thought, had all the invulnerability of Achilles⁠—and no more.

The six new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors clustered in a circle inside a windowless concrete building at the center of the plant.

“You people have twenty Stuart tanks, and a couple of thousand soldiers and cops and undercover-men, here, guarding against sabotage. Don’t you realize that a workman who makes stupid or careless or impulsive mistakes is just as dangerous to the plant as any saboteur?

If somebody shoots you through the head, it doesn’t matter whether he planned to murder you for a year or just didn’t know the gun was loaded; you’re as dead one way as the other.

I should think you’d thank me for trying to eliminate a serious source of danger.”

And in that case, things’ll get settled that much quicker. This Crandall thinks these men I fired are martyrs, and he’s preaching a crusade.

He ought to carry an advocatus diaboli on his payroll, to scrutinize the qualifications of his martyrs, before he starts canonizing them.

”

“My company specializes in cybernetic-control systems,” he continued. “In spite of a lot of misleading colloquial jargon about ‘thinking machines’ and ‘giant brains,’ a cybernetic system doesn’t really think.

It only does what it’s been designed and built to do, and if somebody builds a mistake into it, it will automatically and infallibly repeat that mistake in practice.

”

“He’s right,” Cronnin said. “

The men that build a machine like that have got to be as smart as the machine’s supposed to be, or the machine’ll be as dumb as they are.

”

Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy.

A city that had put all its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.

From that day on, she had wandered in merciful darkness.

She had not been idiotic, or raving mad; she had just escaped from a reality that she could no longer bear.

Varnis, lost in her dreamworld, and Dorita, hard-faced and haggard, were the only ones left, beside Kalvar Dard, of the original eight. But the band had grown, meanwhile, to more than fifteen.

Dard was worried about the ledge; if it came to an end, they would all be trapped. No one would escape. He suddenly felt old and unutterably weary.

It was a frightful weight that he bore⁠—responsibility for an entire race.

Suddenly, behind him, Dorita fired her pistol upward. Dard sprang forward—there was no room for him to jump aside—and drew his pistol. The boy, Bo-Bo, was trying to find a target from his position in the rear. Then Dard saw the two Hairy People;

Just as we wonder, too, at the network of canals which radiate from the polar caps of our sister planet, and speculate on the possibility that they were the work of hands like our own.

And we concoct elaborate jokes about the “Men From Mars”⁠—ourselves.

He chuckled inwardly.

Claire always knew what to do when his temper started climbing to critical mass.

He allowed her to load his plate again.

“If you mean what I think you do, no thanks,” Claire replied. “I suppose I’ll get married, some day—most girls do—but it’ll be to somebody who can hang his business up at the office before he comes home.

Russ Latterman is so married to the store that if he married me too, it’d be bigamy.

Ready for your coffee?” Without waiting for an answer, she filled his cup and ejected a lighted cigarette from the box for him, then snapped on the video screen.

The black-leather-jacketed bodyguards, of course, were discreetly out of range of the camera. Members of the Associated Fraternities of Literates weren’t exactly loved by the non-reading public they claimed to serve.

The sight of one of those starchy, perpetually-spotless, white smocks always affected Pelton like a red cape to a bull.

He snorted in disdain. The raised eyebrow toward the announcer on the left, the quick, perennially boyish smile, followed by the levelly serious gaze into the camera—the whole act might have been a film-transcription of Mongery’s first appearance on the video, fifteen years ago.

Needless to say, there is no police investigation of either incident.

Election shenanigans, like college pranks, are fair play as long as they don’t cause an outright holocaust.

And that, I think, is as it should be,” Mongery went on, more seriously. “Most of the horrors of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries were the result of taking politics too seriously.”

Needless to say, there is no police investigation of either incident. Election shenanigans, like college pranks, are fair play as long as they don’t cause an outright holocaust. And that, I think, is as it should be,” Mongery went on, more seriously. “

Most of the horrors of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries were the result of taking politics too seriously.

”

… and more illiterates had been shoved out of the schools, into a world where radio and television and moving pictures were supplanting books and newspapers, and more and more children of illiterates had gone to school without any desire or incentive to learn to read.

And finally, the illiterates had become Illiterates, and literacy had become Literacy.

And now, the Associated Fraternities of Literates had come to monopolize the ability to read and write, and a few men like William R. Lancedale, with a handful of followers like Ralph N. Prestonby, were trying—

“Yes. It didn’t take us as long to clean up this mess as it did to clean up that mutinous guards company in Pittsburgh. But when we cleaned that up, it stayed cleaned.

This is like trying to bail out a boat with a pitchfork.

”

Sitting down again at the breakfast table with her father, Claire levered another cigarette out of the Readilit and puffed at it with exaggeratedly bored slowness. She was still frightened. Ray shouldn’t have done what he did, even if he had furnished a plausible explanation.

The trouble with plausible explanations was having to make them.

Sooner or later, you made too many, and then you made one that wasn’t so plausible, and then all the others were remembered, and they all looked phony. And why had the Senator had to mention Ralph?

As he listened, he blew smoke rings across the room and toyed with a dagger, made from a file, which had been thrown down the central light-well at him a few days before.

The invention of the pocket recorder, which put a half-hour’s conversation on a half-inch disk, had done more to slow down business and promote inane correspondence than anything since the earlier inventions of shorthand, typewriters and pretty stenographers.

Finally, he cleared the machine, dumping the whole mess into a basket and carrying it out to his secretary.

“That’s what Joyner and Graves say. We don’t believe so. And suppose it did?

Lancedale says, if we’re so incompetent that we have to keep the rest of the world in ignorance to earn a living, the world’s better off without us.

He says that every oligarchy carries in it the seeds of its own destruction; that if we can’t evolve with the rest of the world, we’re doomed in any case. That’s why we want to elect your father.

Cardon explained. Chernov whistled. “

Man, that’s no rabbit; that’s a full-grown Bengal tiger! I hope it doesn’t eat us, by mistake.

”

An elderly Literate on the Joyner-Graves side, an undersized man with a bald head and a narrow mouth, was on his feet.

He looked like an aged rat brought to bay by a terrier.

“I was against this fool idea from the start!” he yelled. “We’ve got to keep the Illiterates down; how are we ever going to do that if we go making Literates out of them? But you two thought you were being smart—”

“Shut up, yourself, Ginter,” a hatchet-faced woman Literate from the Finance Section squawked.

Literate President Morehead, an amiable and ineffective maiden aunt in trousers, pounded frantically with his gavel.

“Order!” he fairly screamed. “This is disgraceful!”

“

We need a gang; the two of us’d last about as long as a pint of beer at a Dutch picnic.

” Ray went to the desk, grabbed a pen, and made a list of names, in a fair imitation of Ralph Prestonby’s neat block-printing. “Give this to the girl outside, and tell her to have them called for and sent in here,” the boy directed.

They all looked at him in puzzled surprise, but nobody gave him any argument.

Funny, now that he thought of it; it had been quite a long time since anybody had ever given him any argument about anything.

A couple of guys out in Pittsburgh had tried it, but somehow they’d lost interest in arguing, after a little—

“I never guess,” the oldster with the silver bar and the keystone-shaped red patch on his left shoulder replied. “

It is a shocking habit⁠—destructive to the logical faculty.

What seems strange to you is only so because you do not follow my train of thought. For example, the wheels and their framework under your flying machine are splashed with mud which seems to be predominantly brick-dust, mixed with plaster.

“How is it you took so long finding us,” Alex Barrett asked. “It’s been two hundred or so years since the Wars.”

“Alex! You see but you do not observe!” The Toon Leader rebuked.

“These people have their flying machines, which are highly complicated mechanisms. They would have to make tools and machines to make them, and tools and machines to make those tools and machines. They would have to find materials, often going far in search of them.

he asked. “Good. Then all I have to do is hold the helicopter steady, keep it at the right altitude, level, and pointed in the right direction, and watch through the sight while you move the flag around, and direct you by radio.

Why wasn’t I born quintuplets?

”

She nodded. For over twelve millennia, the people of her race and Vall’s and Tortha Karf’s had been existing as parasites on all the innumerable other worlds of alternate probability on the lateral dimension of time.

Smart parasites never injure their hosts, and try never to reveal their existence.

“We could do that, couldn’t we, Vall?” she asked, angry at herself now for giving in. “And if you want to question these slaves, I speak Kharanda, and I know how they think. And I’m a qualified and licensed narco-hypnotic technician.”

Her face was masked in the stuff, and her hair was covered with an elastic cap.

He had always suspected that beauty was the real feminine religion, from the willingness of its devotees to submit to martyrdom for it.

She wiggled a hand at him in greeting.

The detective-lieutenant looked worried. “We’ve been taking a pretty high hand with them as it is,” he protested.

“It’s safer to kill a Citizen than bloody a Prole’s nose; they have all sorts of laws to protect them.”

“There are all sorts of laws to protect the Paratime Secret,” Vall replied. “And I think there are one or two laws against murdering members of the Executive Council. In case P.P.L. makes any trouble, they aren’t here;

“Good actress, too,” Tortha Karf said. “

It’s not easy to impersonate yourself.

”

The dome above and around them vanished; the bare, tower-forested, building-dotted world of Police Terminal vanished, too, into the uniform green of the uninhabited Fifth Level.

A planet could take pretty good care of itself, he thought, if people would only leave it alone.

Then he began to see the fields and villages of Fourth Level. Cities appeared and vanished, growing higher and vaster as they went across the more civilized Third Level.

“And we don’t. There is no Rosetta Stone, not anywhere on Mars.”

A whole race, a whole species, died while the first Crò-Magnon cave-artist was daubing pictures of reindeer and bison, and across fifty thousand years and fifty million miles there was no bridge of understanding.

“We’ll find one. There must be something, somewhere, that will give us the meaning of a few words, and we’ll use them to pry meaning out of more words, and so on.

The last one hadn’t. It had been stripped of its contents and fittings, a piece of this and a bit of that, haphazardly, apparently over a long period of time, until it had been almost gutted.

For centuries, as it had died, this city had been consuming itself by a process of auto-cannibalism.

She said something to that effect.

She shook her head. “Meaning isn’t something that evaporates with time,” she argued. “

It has just as much meaning now as it ever had. We just haven’t learned how to decipher it.

”

“This’ll wipe a little more of that superior grin off Tony Lattimer’s face,” Fitzgerald was saying, as they went down the motionless escalator to the floor below. “Tony wants to be a big shot.

When you want to be a big shot, you can’t bear the possibility of anybody else being a bigger big shot, and whoever makes a start on reading this language will be the biggest big shot archaeology ever saw.

”

Ivan Fitzgerald’s words echoed back to her—when you want to be a big shot, you can’t bear the possibility of anybody else being a bigger big shot. His derision of her own efforts became comprehensible, too.

It wasn’t that he was convinced that she would never learn to read the Martian language. He had been afraid that she would.

Ivan Fitzgerald finally isolated the germ that had caused the Finchley girl’s undiagnosed illness. Shortly afterward, the malady turned into a mild fever, from which she recovered. Nobody else seemed to have caught it.

Lectures. The organization of a Society of Martian Archaeology, with Anthony Lattimer, Ph. D., the logical candidate for the chair. Degrees, honors; the deference of the learned, and the adulation of the lay public. Positions, with impressive titles and salaries.

Sweet are the uses of publicity.

She crushed out her cigarette and got to her feet. “Well, I still have the final lists of what we found in Halvhulva—Biology—department to check over. I’m starting on Sornhulva tomorrow, and I want that stuff in shape for expert evaluation.”

That was the sort of thing Tony Lattimer wanted to get away from, the detail-work and the drudgery.

Let the infantry do the slogging through the mud; the brass-hats got the medals.

She was halfway through the fifth floor, a week later, and was having midday lunch in the reading room on the first floor when Hubert Penrose came over and sat down beside her, asking her what she was doing. She told him.

“This is better than a bilingual, Martha,” Hubert Penrose said. “

Physical science expresses universal facts; necessarily it is a universal language.

Heretofore archaeologists have dealt only with pre-scientific cultures.”

“And, third, forestall or expose the plans for the z’Srauff invasion of New Texas.”

Is that all, now? I thought. He doesn’t want a diplomat; he wants a magician.

“And what,” I asked, “will my official position be on New Texas, sir? Or will I have one, of any sort?”

Then I took a second look at him.

He might be happy, but he wasn’t a moron. He just looked like one.

Natalenko’s people often did, as one of their professional assets.

The sanctity of an Ambassador’s person not only made the carrying of weapons unnecessary, so that an armed Ambassador was a contradiction of diplomatic terms, but it would be an outrageous insult to the nation to which he had been accredited.

Like taking a poison-taster to a friendly dinner.

Maybe I was supposed to give the belt and the holsters to Hoddy Ringo. …

If the New Texans murdered two Solar League Ambassadors in a row, nobody would blame the League for moving in with a space-fleet and an army. …

I was beginning to understand how Doctor Guillotin must have felt while his neck was being shoved into his own invention.

I looked again at the notebooks, each marked in red: Familiarize yourself with contents and burn or disintegrate.

“Shucks, that wasn’t nothin’,” the driver disclaimed. “

When you drive for politicians, you’re either good or you’re good and dead.

”

I stood there a moment, looking at it. I was remembering, and finally understanding, what my psycho-history lessons about the “Romantic Freeze” had meant.

They had taken this little mission-fort down, brick by adobe brick, loaded it carefully into a spaceship, brought it here, forty two light-years away from Terra, and reverently set it up again. Then they had built a whole world and a whole social philosophy around it.

It had been the dissatisfied, of course, the discontented, the dreamers, who had led the vanguard of man’s explosion into space following the discovery of the hyperspace-drive.

They ignored the fact that their life here on Capella IV was possible only by application of modern industrial technology. That rodeo down the plaza—tank-tilting instead of bronco-busting.

Here they were, living frozen in a romantic dream, a world of roving cowboys and ranch kingdoms.

No wonder Hoddy hadn’t liked the books I had been reading on the ship. They shook the fabric of that dream.

“Don’t take all this as a personal tribute, Mr. Silk!” Hutchinson screamed into my ear. “

On this planet, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a good barbecue halloweth any cause!

”

The Ambassador from Alpheratz II, the South African Nationalist planet, with a full beard, and old fashioned plug hat and tailcoat. They were a frustrated lot.

They had gone into space to practice apartheid and had settled on a planet where there was no other intelligent race to be superior to.

…

“

Any diplomat can explain anything!

” she shouted back.

“Ambassador Silk, may I present one of our leading citizens and large ranchers, Colonel Andrew Jackson Hickock.”

Dumbarton Oaks had taught me how to maintain the proper diplomat’s unchanging expression; drinking superbourbon had been a postgraduate course.

I needed that training as I finally learned Gail’s last name.

“

Keep a government poor and weak and it’s your servant; let it get rich and powerful and it’s your master. We don’t want any masters here on New Texas.

”

He laughed. “

Son, if I started acting like a master around this ranch in the morning, they’d find my body in an irrigation ditch before sunset.

“Sure, if you have a real army, you can keep the men under your thumb—use one regiment or one division to put down mutiny in another.

“

You can’t degrade a Bonney!

” a voice from the balcony put in.

“We’re going to get the brains behind them, if we have to send every warship we own into the z’Srauff star-cluster and devastate every planet in it.

We don’t let dogs snap at us. And when they do, we don’t kick them, we shoot them!

”

Then somebody yelled, “

Hey, look! Even his wrist watch is blushing!

”

“

It isn’t blackmail to tell a man that a bomb he’s going to throw will blow up in his hand.

” Chalmers glanced quickly at his watch. “Now, Doctor Whitburn, if you have nothing further to discuss, I have a class in a few minutes. If you’ll excuse me. …”

You can’t even indicate the present. By the time you make up your mind to say, ‘Now!’ and transmit the impulse to your vocal organs, and utter the word, the original present moment is part of the past. The knife-edge has gone over it.

Most people think they know only the present; what they know is the past, which they have already experienced, or read about. The difference with me is that I can see what’s on both sides of the knife-edge.

”

He thought for a time of the Sepoy Mutiny, and then rejected it—he could “remember” something much like that on one of the planets of the Beta Hydrae system, in the Fourth Century of the Atomic Era.

There were so few things, in the history of the past, which did not have their counterparts in the future.

That evening, too, he stayed at home, preparing for his various classes for the rest of the week and making copious notes on what he would talk about to each. He needed more whiskey to get to sleep that night.

“

Yes, of course; the man’s dead. So’s Julius Caesar, but we’ve gotten over being shocked at his murder.

”

“Yes.” His anger died down as Fitch spoke. “I’m glad Tom stopped me from making an ass of myself. I can see your side of it.”

Maybe that was the curse of the professional intellectual, an ability to see everybody’s side of everything.

He thought for a moment. “What else did you do, beside hand this story to the Valley Times? I’d better hear all about it.”

He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “

Confidentially, Max, neither do I. But don’t tell anybody I’m not. It’s a secret.

”

When he had been a boy, the old men had talked about a long-ago time when there had been hundreds of them visible in the sky, every morning and evening. But that had been long ago indeed. Starships came but seldom to this world, now.

This world was old and lonely and poor. Like poor lonely old Raud the Keeper.

He felt angry to find himself thinking like that. Never pity yourself, Raud; be proud. That was what his father had always taught him: “Be proud, for you are the Keeper’s son, and when I am gone, you will be the Keeper after me.

He felt angry to find himself thinking like that.

Never pity yourself, Raud; be proud.

That was what his father had always taught him: “Be proud, for you are the Keeper’s son, and when I am gone, you will be the Keeper after me. But in your pride, be humble, for what you will keep is the Crown.”

Now its light was as dim and yellow as firelight. He’d have to replace it soon, but this trip he had needed new cartridges for the big rifle.

A man could live in darkness more easily than he could live without cartridges.

The big black dogs were rising from their bed of deerskins on the stone slab that covered the crypt in the far corner. They did not come to meet him, but stayed in their place of trust, greeting him with anxious, eager little sounds.

“

Gorth Sledmaker’s a fool. He thinks the world began in the time of his grandfather.

” He had the thongs untied, and spread the bearskin, revealing the blackened leather box, flat on the bottom and domed at the top. “How long ago do you think it was that the Ice-Father was born?” he asked Salvadro and Dranigo.

The Federation armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left behind; even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost of removal.

Ever since, Poictesme had been living on salvage.

The uniform the first officer was wearing was forty years old—and it was barely a month out of the original packing.

On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an explorer for, say, uranium deposits.

Rodney Maxwell found plenty of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.

The old replacement depot or classification center or training area or whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted buildings.

That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been five years since he had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of them bothered.

A gun was what a boy put on to show that he had reached manhood, and a man carried for the rest of his life out of habit.

Why, there wouldn’t be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn’t count the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level or camped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it;

“Dad, computermen don’t like to hear computers called smart,” Conn said. “

They aren’t. The people who build them are smart; a computer only knows what’s fed to it.

They can hold more information in their banks than a man can in his memory, they can combine it faster, they don’t get tired or absentminded. But they can’t imagine, they can’t create, and they can’t do anything a human brain can’t.”

“I’d come home intending to—tell them there was no Brain, tell them to stop wasting their time hunting for it and start trying to figure out the answers themselves. But I couldn’t.

They don’t believe in the Brain as a tool, to use; it’s a machine god that they can bring all their troubles to.

You can’t take a thing like that away from people without giving them something better.”

But I couldn’t. They don’t believe in the Brain as a tool, to use; it’s a machine god that they can bring all their troubles to.

You can’t take a thing like that away from people without giving them something better.

”

He looked down at the dusty fountain on which his father sat. “

That ghost-dream haunts this graveyard. I want to give them living dreams that they can make come true.

”

anybody knew that. The trouble was that he had never met anybody—which included physicists, biologists, psychologists, psionicists, philosophers and theologians—who could define the difference in satisfactorily exact terms. He watched the robot pivot on its treads and glide away, trailing steam from its coffee pot.

It might be silly to treat robots like people, but that wasn’t as bad as treating people like robots, an attitude which was becoming entirely too prevalent.

If only so many people didn’t act like robots!

Was he going to have to endure the Bench of Counselors twice in the same day? Then the vexation was washed out of his face by a spreading grin. Bench of Counselors; that was the answer! Elevate Harv Dorflay to the Bench.

That was what the Bench was for, a gold-plated dustbin for the disposal of superannuated dignitaries.

He’d do no harm there, and a touch of outright lunacy might enliven and even improve the Bench.

He had to terminate the conversation himself and blank the screen. Viktor Ganzay was still staring at him in shocked incredulity when his image vanished.

Viktor Ganzay could not imagine anybody not wanting the Throne, not even the man who had to sit on it.

He sat, for a while, looking at the darkened screen, a little worried. Viktor Ganzay had a much better intelligence service than he had believed. He wondered how much Ganzay had found out that he hadn’t mentioned. Then he went back to the reports.

“

I always thought that when authority began inspiring contempt, it had stopped being authority.

Did you say science? This isn’t going to help Duklass and Tammsan any.”

“

An emperor who has a son can be spared. An emperor’s son who is too young to marry can’t.

You know that.”

“He knows perfectly well what he’s saying, and it probably scares him more than it does you. The difference is that he’s willing to face it and you aren’t.”

The difference was that Faress was a scientist and Dandrik was a science teacher.

To Faress, a new door had opened, the first new door in eight hundred years. To Dandrik, it threatened invalidation of everything he had taught since the morning he had opened his first class.

“There, Your Majesty,” Khane said. “You see how much respect for authority this hooligan has!”

On Aditya, such would be unthinkable; on Aditya, everybody respects authority. Whether it’s respectable or not.

Count Tammsan laughed, and he realized that he must have spoken aloud. Nobody else seemed to have gotten the joke.

“Khane.

Isn’t it wonderful; if you have a few problems, you have trouble, but if you have a whole lot of problems, they start solving each other.

We get a chance to get rid of Khane and create a vacancy that can be filled by somebody big enough to fill it; the Ministry of Education gets out from under a nasty situation; First Citizen Yaggo gets what he thinks he wants—”

“Paul, we agreed upon this long ago, when we were still boys at the University.

The Empire stopped growing, and when things stop growing, they start dying, the death of petrifaction.

And when petrifaction is complete, the cracking and the crumbling starts, and there’s no way of stopping it. But if we can get people out onto new planets, the Empire won’t die; it’ll start growing again.”

The decision had cost Benson a battle with his conscience from which he had emerged the sole survivor.

The conscience was buried along with Bill Myers, and all that remained was a purpose.

Evri-Flave stayed on the market unaltered. The night before the national election, the World Sovereignty party distributed thousands of gallons of Evri-Flave; their speakers, on every radio and television network, were backgrounded by soft music.

“The sponsor’ll give out first,” I said. “

History is just one damn crossroads after another.

” I mentioned, in passing, that I taught the subject. “Why, since the beginning of this century, we’ve had enough of them to keep the show running for a year.”

There; he’d come out and said it. In all the years they’d worked together at the Instituto Argentino de Ciencia Fisica, that had been unmentioned between them.

The families of hanged cutthroats avoid mention of ropes and knives.

He thumbed the old-fashioned American lighter and held it to his pipe. Across the veranda, in the darkness, he knew that Pitov was looking intently at him.

They both got to their feet, Richardson pulling himself up reluctantly.

The older you get, the harder it is to leave a comfortable chair.

He settled himself beside his colleague and former enemy, and the jeep started again, rolling between the buildings of the living-quarters area and out onto the long, straight road across the pampas toward the distant blaze of electric lights.

“

Anything can be used as a weapon; you could stab a man to death with that lead pencil you’re using,

” Pitov replied. “But I doubt if negamatter will ever be so used. We’re certainly not working on weapons design here.

“Of course he’s making a profit,” Gonzales said. “

Why else is he running a plantation? If planters didn’t make profits, who’d grow biocrystals?

”

He mentioned several other occasions when something like that had happened. “

You can’t tell that kind of people the truth. They won’t believe it. It doesn’t agree with their preconceptions.

”

Travis groaned. “We can’t keep all of them in that hangar, and we don’t have anywhere else—”

Sometimes a new idea sneaked up on Miles, rubbing against him and purring like a cat. Sometimes one hit him like a sledgehammer. This one just seemed to grow inside him.

“Foxx, you know I have the top three floors of the Suzikami Building; about five hundred hours ago, I leased the fourth and fifth floors, directly below. I haven’t done anything with them, yet; they’re just as they were when Trans-Space Imports moved out.

“I never deliberately force them to adopt our ways,” he replied. “Our chairs are as uncomfortable for them as their low seats are for us.

Difference, you know, doesn’t mean inferiority or superiority. It just means difference.

”

“

Field surgery’s brutal, too, especially when the anaesthetics run out. It’s better than letting your wounded die, though.

”

He nodded, slowly and solemnly. “

The nut of the fooshkoot is bitter,

” he agreed.

“They accepted it intellectually. But when I told them that there wasn’t any chance of Kwannon getting any closer to Alpha, they rebelled emotionally.

It doesn’t matter how conclusively you prove anything, if the person to whom you prove it can’t accept your proof emotionally, it’s still false. Not-real.

”

“Can you prove that was a lie?” Travis asked. “Let’s see yours. Draw—soul! Inspection—soul!”

Naturally. Foxx Travis would expect a soul to be carried in a holster.

“But they’ll look down on us, now. They’ll say we’re just like animals,” Edith almost wailed.

he kept the camp lighted, a strong guard on the alert, and the area of darkness beyond infra red lighted and covered by photoelectric sentries on the ground and snoopers in the air. Like Paul Meillard, Luis Gofredo was a worrier and a pessimist.

Everything happened for the worst in this worst of all possible galaxies, and if anything could conceivably go wrong, it infallibly would.

That was probably why he was still alive and had never had a command massacred.

It did.

Silence fell, bounced noisily, and then settled over the crowd.

Gofredo went on talking to them: “Take it easy, now; easy.” He might have been speaking to a frightened dog or a fractious horse. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. This is nothing but the great noise-magic of the Terrans. …”

“No; we can’t take any punitive action. Not now,” Meillard said. “But we’ll have to do something for them.”

Vengeance, it seemed, wasn’t what they wanted.

The woman made vehement gestures of rejection toward the village, then bowed, placing her hands on her brow. The man imitated her obeisance, then they both straightened. The woman pointed to herself and to the man, and around the circle of huts and landing craft.

“

Well, those who can do, and those who can’t teach,

” he told her. “You can study recordings, and tell us what the words are and teach us how to recognize and pronounce them. You’re the only linguist we have.”

The natives, however, missed that part of it; they were howling piteously and rubbing their heads. All but Sonny. He was just mildly surprised at what had happened to the Dom.-C.

Sonny, it would appear, was stone deaf.

As anticipated, there was another uproar later in the morning when the ditching machine started north across the meadow.

they were screaming in unison at each other. “They make their decisions by endurance; the party that can resist the feelings of the other longest converts their opponents.”

“Pure democracy,” Gofredo declared. “Rule by the party that can make the most noise.”

“And I’ll bet that when they’re sick, they go around chanting, ‘I am well; I feel just fine!’ ” Anna said. “Autosuggestion would really work, here. Think of the feedback, too. One Svant has a feeling.

You know, you’re not going to have any trouble at all, when we go down-country to talk to the king or whatever. This is better than firewater ever was.”

“We must never misuse our advantage, Luis,” Meillard said seriously. “We must use it only for their good.”

He really meant it. Only—You had to know some general history to study technological history, and it seemed to him that that pious assertion had been made a few times before.

He really meant it. Only—

You had to know some general history to study technological history, and it seemed to him that that pious assertion had been made a few times before.

Some of the others who had made it had really meant it, too, but that had made little difference in the long run.

“Number Five; the really tough one,” Degbrend considered. “I take it that by interpolations you do not mean dilutions?”

“Oh, no; don’t water the drink. Spike it.”

Lanze Degbrend grinned at him. Then he snapped down the visor of his helmet, unslung his carbine, and presented it. He was still standing at present arms when Trevannion blanked the screen.

Count Erskyll said nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun.

Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer.

But, at the same time, he was opposed to authoritarianism, except, of course, when necessary for the real good of the people. And he did not like rulers who called themselves Lords-Master. Good democratic rulers called themselves Servants of the People.

For several centuries, there had been communication between them and their home planet. Then Morglay had become involved in one of the interplanetary dynastic wars that had begun the decadence of the Space Vikings, and again Aditya dropped out of history.

Until this morning, when history returned in the black ships of the Galactic Empire.

He stubbed out the cigarette and summoned the robot to give him another. Shatrak was speaking:

“Ah, yes; the armament, sir. There are eight big launching cradles for panplanetary or off-planet missiles. They are all polished up like the Crown Jewels. But none, repeat none, of them is operative. And there is not a single missile on the installation.”

Shatrak’s facial control didn’t slip. It merely intensified, which amounted to the same thing.

“Lieutenant Carmath, I am morally certain I heard you correctly, but let’s just check. You said. …”