Short Fiction quotes

I thought it was sort of cute at the time, although in questionable taste. I don’t know a thing about science—I’m in the dress line—but I’ve always looked upon it with the greatest respect.

The way I see it, you start laughing at scientists and they come up with something like the atom bomb.

Better to treat them with a little respect.

I didn’t know what to believe. The only article that made any sense to me was one written by a social commentator, and he wasn’t even a full-fledged scientist.

He said it looked as if someone was doing a big job of housecleaning in our galaxy.

The Thomas kid had his own theories. He was sure it was the work of invaders from another dimension. He told me they were sucking our galaxy into theirs, which was in another dimension, like dust into a vacuum cleaner.

“She, you mean,” Minnie said. “The old masculine idea that God must be a man is just so much ego-wash. Why, the feminine principle is evident all through the universe. Why, why, you just can’t say Him when—when—”

Minnie had never been too strong on ideas.

She ran out of breath and stood, panting and pushing back her hair.

Standing at the window I saw the first light of the false dawn. It was going to be a beautiful day over New York. There were no visible stars, but every light in the city was on, making stars of its own.

It was as though the city was burning candles to the unknown.

“Goodbye, Jane,” I said. I knew she was right. The announcement would come just at dawn. I hoped Minnie was in her husband’s arms; and Frank—I felt he was probably on a horse, standing up in the unfamiliar saddle and looking toward the East.

It certainly should have ended there. Judgment day should have come, bringing with it whatever it brought. We were ready. All the worldly goods were disposed of, in New York and I suppose, in the rest of the world.

But ten years was too long, too much a strain on goodness.

We should have been able to carry on. There was no reason why not. We could have gone back to our jobs. The farmers were still on the farms, the grocers and clerks were still around.

The farmers didn’t want to go back to their farms, and the grocers didn’t want to return to their groceries. Oh, some did. Many did, for a while. But not for long.

Everyone talked about high ideals, but it was just talk, just like before.

For six months Jane and I struggled along, not getting much to eat, frightened by the mobs that surged around New York. Finally, we decided to move out. We joined the exodus leaving New York, drifted through Pennsylvania, and headed North.

Thousands were starving, then millions. Some had food, but they weren’t very willing to share it. They were figuring what they’d do for ten years, if they shared their food. Money they’d still hand out in basketfuls. It wasn’t worth anything.

In nine months a million dollars wouldn’t buy a rotten turnip.

As time passed, fewer and fewer stayed on the job. The money they got wouldn’t buy anything. Besides, why work when the end was so near? Why work for someone else?

“So that’s what Galactic meant by ‘a unique social structure,’ ” Fannia said morosely. He stripped off his armor and lay down on his bunk. “

Their way of making war is to suicide their enemies into capitulation.

”

Carrin hoped the A.E. man wouldn’t ask to see the kitchen.

He visualized the Castile Motors Bartender in there, like a porcupine in a dog show.

“I’m proud to say that most of the people in this neighborhood buy from us,” Mr. Pathis was saying. “We’re a solid firm.”

“Why, sir, today the average man is living like a king. A hundred years ago the richest man in the world couldn’t buy what any ordinary citizen possesses at present.

You mustn’t look upon it as a debt. It’s an investment.

”

It went back to feeding on the Earth. The energy, used to produce more cells, was soon dissipated. Soon it was hungry again.

It would always be hungry.

O’Donnell retreated with his demoralized men. They camped ten miles from the leech’s southern edge, in the evacuated town of Schroon Lake. The leech was over sixty miles in diameter now and still growing fast.

Perhaps that was the very reason he was doubting it now.

Gelsen suspected that you don’t solve human problems so easily.

There had to be a catch somewhere.

The watchbirds were learning rapidly, expanding and adding to their knowledge. Loosely defined abstractions were extended, acted upon and re-extended.

Metal and electrons reason well, but not in a human fashion.

A living organism? Any living organism!

Slaughterhouses in Chicago stopped and cattle starved to death in their pens, because farmers in the Midwest couldn’t cut hay or harvest grain.

No one had told the watchbirds that all life depends on carefully balanced murders.

Starvation didn’t concern the watchbirds, since it was an act of omission.

The watchbirds tried to guard their other charges. Wolves were slaughtered, trying to kill rabbits. Rabbits were electrocuted, trying to eat vegetables. Creepers were burned out in the act of strangling trees.

A butterfly was executed, caught in the act of outraging a rose.

This control was spasmodic, because of the fewness of the watchbirds. A billion watchbirds couldn’t have carried out the ambitious project set by the thousands.

The effect was of a murderous force, ten thousand bolts of irrational lightning raging around the country, striking a thousand times a day.

Lightning which anticipated your moves and punished your intentions.

“Gentlemen, please,” the government representative begged. “We must hurry.”

Lek asked other questions, and Answerer was unable to answer them. Lek viewed things through his specialized eyes, extracted a part of the truth and refused to see more.

How to tell a blind man the sensation of green?

Answerer didn’t try. He wasn’t supposed to.

The questions will never be asked, and Answerer remembers something his builders knew and forgot.

In order to ask a question you must already know most of the answer.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the voice said. “I’m no one’s subconscious. I’m me. Will you help me?”

Anders believed in voices as much as anyone; that is, he didn’t believe in them at all, until he heard them.

Swiftly he catalogued the possibilities. Schizophrenia was the best answer, of course, and one in which his colleagues would concur. But Anders had a lamentable confidence in his own sanity. In which case—

He nodded, and she led him across the room, to the improbable green-and-yellow couch. Sitting down, Anders decided he would tell her when she came back with the drink. No use in putting off the fatal moment.

A lemming in love, he told himself.

“You’re getting warm again,” the voice said.

At that moment Anders was as thoroughly out of love as a man could be.

Viewing one’s intended as a depersonalized, sexless piece of machinery is not especially conducive to love.

But it is quite stimulating, intellectually.

“Go on!” the voice shouted. “You’re hot! Go on!”

What was an atom? An empty space surrounded by an empty space.

“Then it’s all false!” Anders said. And he was alone under the stars.

The Ambassador’s suite was very special. It had been hurriedly constructed two days after he had landed and delivered his message. The suite was steel and lead lined, filled with video and movie cameras, recorders, and a variety of other things.

It was the last word in elaborate death cells.

In the screen, Cercy could see the Ambassador sitting at a table. He was typing on a little portable the Government had given him.

Cercy read it aloud: “

The simplest defense against any and all weapons, is to become each particular weapon.

”

Bacteria was piped in, first the known germ diseases, then mutated species.

The diplomat didn’t even sneeze.

He was showered with electricity, radiation, wooden weapons, iron weapons, copper weapons, brass weapons, uranium weapons—anything and everything, just to cover all possibilities.

Then, the smells. Then, everything else they could think of that could drive a man insane.

The Ambassador slept peacefully through it all.

“Now look,” Cercy said, the following day, “let’s start using our damned heads.” His voice was hoarse and rough. Although the psychological torture hadn’t bothered the Ambassador, it seemed to have backfired on Cercy and his men.

“It’s the payoff question,” Cercy said. “

No use throwing a spear at a man who can turn into one.

”

The Ambassador reappeared in his chair, where he sat smoking and watching the beasts kill each other.

In ten minutes the room looked like an abattoir.

But by then the Ambassador had tired of the spectacle, and was reclining on his bed, reading.

“What is there of him?” Cercy asked. “He looks like a man, but he can change into anything else. You can’t attack him; he adapts.

He’s like water, taking the shape of any vessel he’s poured into.

”

“I just wish they’d come,” Edwardson said. He returned from the port to his chair, bending to clear the low metal ceiling. “Don’t you wish they’d come?”

Edwardson had the narrow, timid face of a mouse; but a highly intelligent mouse. One that cats did well to avoid.

The other men didn’t answer. They had settled back to their dreams, staring hypnotically at the Detector face.

Cassel yawned and licked his lips. “Anyone want to play some gin?” he asked, stroking his beard. The beard was a memento of his undergraduate days.

Cassel maintained he could store almost fifteen minutes worth of oxygen in its follicles. He had never stepped into space unhelmeted to prove it.

Morse looked away, and Edwardson automatically watched the indicator. This routine had been drilled into them, branded into their subconscious. They would as soon have cut their throats as leave the indicator unguarded.

Something was needed to nullify their tremendous advantage. But what sort of something?

What armor is there against thought? How do you dodge a wavelength?

Pouch-eyed scientists gravely consulted their periodic tables.

Something was needed to nullify their tremendous advantage. But what sort of something? What armor is there against thought? How do you dodge a wavelength?

Pouch-eyed scientists gravely consulted their periodic tables.

And how do you know when a man has been possessed? Although the enemy was clumsy with Everset, would they continue to be clumsy? Wouldn’t they learn?

And how do you know when a man has been possessed? Although the enemy was clumsy with Everset, would they continue to be clumsy? Wouldn’t they learn?

Psychologists tore their hair and bewailed the absence of an absolute scale for humanity.

Of course, something had to be done at once. The answer, from a technological planet, was a technological one. Build a space fleet and equip it with some sort of a detection-fire network.

In time, Mark built more complicated conversations into Charles. He couldn’t give the robot free choice, of course, but he managed a pretty close approximation of it. Slowly, Charles’ personality emerged. But it was strikingly different from Mark’s.

Where Mark was querulous, Charles was calm. Mark was sardonic, Charles was naive.

Mark was a cynic, Charles was an idealist. Mark was often sad; Charles was forever content.

“You’re a bloody poet,” Mark would say, half admiringly. “A poor poet.”

Time passed unnoticed by the stars, and the air pump hissed and clanked and leaked.

Mark was fixing it constantly, but the air of Martha became increasingly rare. Although Charles labored in the fields, the crops, deprived of sufficient air, died.

Wearily he flowed into a comfortable position on the lumpy ground. Then he pulled himself together hastily.

Comfort was not in the line of duty, he reminded himself, and firmly took a Pilot’s Shape.

But a Pilot’s Shape wasn’t constructed for sleeping on damp, bumpy ground. Pid spent a restless night, thinking of ships, and wishing he were flying one.

Casker decided sadly that he didn’t have enough strength to strangle Hellman, no matter how pleasant it might be. Very quietly, he said, “

Kindly stop making like a scientist.

Let’s see if there isn’t something we can gulp down.”

“Nothing I can do,” Hellman said, reading on. “Ah, here’s the error. It doesn’t say ‘Everyone drinks Voozy.’ Wrong subject. ‘Voozy drinks everyone.’ That tells us something! The Helgans must have soaked liquid in through their pores.

Naturally, they would prefer to be drunk, instead of to drink.

”

“

Come, come. Faint heart never filled an empty stomach.

”

“Requisition granted,” Somers said. “

All right, gentlemen, responsibility is inevitably circular.

Let’s get a grip on ourselves. Mr. Rajcik, suppose you radio Mars.”

“I am not.

A machine feels this way because it knows it is an unnatural creation in nature’s domain.

Therefore it wishes to reach entropy and cease—a mechanical death wish.”

“And you’re responding to it like a stunned ox,” Rajcik said. “Wake up, Captain!

If you can’t live with joy, at least try to extract some pleasure from your dying.

”

With so much at stake, Charles Dennison should not have been careless. An inventor cannot afford carelessness, particularly when his invention is extremely valuable and obviously patentable.

There are too many grasping hands ready to seize what belongs to someone else, too many men who feast upon the creativity of the innocent.

A touch of paranoia would have served Dennison well; but he was lacking in that vital characteristic of inventors.

An inventor cannot afford carelessness, particularly when his invention is extremely valuable and obviously patentable. There are too many grasping hands ready to seize what belongs to someone else, too many men who feast upon the creativity of the innocent.

A touch of paranoia would have served Dennison well; but he was lacking in that vital characteristic of inventors.

And he didn’t even realize the full extent of his carelessness until a bullet, fired from a silenced weapon, chipped a granite wall not three inches from his head.

“Of course. But they let us live because, every so often, one of us gives up and joins them. And they don’t think we can ever break out.

They’re much too smug. It’s the basic defect of all power-elites, and their eventual undoing.

”

“And some of you have been trying to break out for fifty years? Why, it’ll take forever to escape!”

“Forever is exactly how long we have,” said Ferris.

“But we hope it won’t take quite that long. Every new man brings new ideas, plans. One of them is bound to work.”

They had left their spaceship before dawn, in order to witness the sunrise ceremonies in the village of Loray, upon the planet of the same name.

Sunrise ceremonies, viewed from a proper distance, are often colorful and can provide a whole chapter for an anthropologist’s book; but Loray, as usual, proved a disappointment.

Without fanfare, the sun rose, in answers to prayers made to it the preceding night. Slowly it hoisted its dull red expanse above the horizon, warming the topmost branches of the great rainforest that surrounded the village. And the natives slept on. …

He had accompanied the professor for close to ten years, had journeyed with him to dozens of planets, and had seen many strange and wonderful things.

Everything he saw, however, only increased his contempt for the Galaxy at large.

He desired only to return, wealthy and famous, or wealthy and unknown, to his home in Bayonne, New Jersey.

“We quite understand,” Carver broke in smoothly. “We know about sacred things.

Sacred things are sacred. They are not to be touched by profane hands.

”

But now, after twenty-one days and eighteen hundred miles, he had learned respect for this waterless waste of sand and stone three times the area of the Sahara. You really could die here!

But you could also get rich, and that was what Morrison planned to do.

His radio hummed. At full volume, he could hear the faintest murmur of dance music from Venusborg. Then it faded and only the hum was left.

By nightfall, Morrison was ready. He looked regretfully at the twenty cans of water he was leaving.

In the desert, water was a man’s most precious possession, second only to his telephone.

But it couldn’t be helped. After drinking his fill, he hoisted his pack and set a southwest course into the desert.

“That’s what every prospector thinks,” Mr. Reade said. “

Every prospector on Venus is only a day from goldenstone. And they all expect credit from Public Utility.

”

“I am a businessman,” Mr. Boyard said, “not a jeweler.

I wouldn’t know goldenstone from goldenrod.

”

He heard a movement behind him. Whirling around, he saw a huge old wolf in full charge. Without a moment’s hesitation, Morrison drew and fired, blasting off the top of the beast’s head.

“Damn it,” Morrison said. “I was going to save that bullet for myself.”

It gave him a moment’s grace. He ran down the ravine, looking for an opening in its sides. Goldenstone glowed at him and sparkled red and purple. And the sandwolves loped along behind him.

“Quite a delicacy, I’m told,” said Williams 4, who had been peering over his shoulder. “But not very satisfactory under the circumstances.

Well, young man, I hate to see anyone die on his birthday. The best I can wish you is a speedy and painless departure.

”

“I know,” Williams 4 said. “Do you think I feel happy about it?

Even a robot has some feelings!

”

“Look at it.” Morrison turned the telephone so that Krandall could see the glowing walls of the ravine.

“Looks real,” Krandall said. “But unfortunately, all that glitters is not goldenstone.”

“What can we do?” Morrison asked.

But at last he stood beneath the Prospector’s Special, higher than a church steeple, wider than a house, filled with water more precious than goldenstone itself. He turned the spigot at the bottom. Water soaked the yellow sands and ran in rivulets down the dune.

He should have ordered a cup or glass, Morrison thought, lying on his back with open mouth.

That was it. The descending object was a spaceship. There had been many of them during the great days of the Quedak.

Those great days were over, buried forever beneath the powdery sands. Only the Quedak remained.

He had life and he had a mission to perform. The driving urgency of his mission remained, even after memory and function had failed.

And the Quedak, driven by the imperative Quedak mission, dragged itself painfully down from the little hilltop. Every movement was an agony.

If he were a selfish creature, the Quedak would have died. But he was not selfish.

Quedaks owed a duty to the universe; and that spaceship, after all the blank years, was a link to other worlds, to planets where the Quedak could live again and give his services to the native fauna.

The Quedak retreated to the dark rear of the ship. He found a metal shelf and attached himself to the underside of it near the wall. After a while he felt the ship tremble.

The Quedak clung to the shelf during the long, slow flight through space.

He had forgotten what spaceships were like, but now memory revived briefly. He felt blazing heat and freezing cold. Adjusting to the temperature changes drained his small store of vitality, and the Quedak began to wonder if he was going to die.

He had forgotten what spaceships were like, but now memory revived briefly. He felt blazing heat and freezing cold. Adjusting to the temperature changes drained his small store of vitality, and the Quedak began to wonder if he was going to die.

He refused to die. Not while there was still a possibility of accomplishing the Quedak mission.

In time he felt the harsh pull of gravity, and felt the main jets firing again. The ship was coming down to its planet.

As the ship entered the pass, the skipper threw the wheel hard over. The schooner spun on its keel. Coral flashed by on either side, close enough to touch.

There was a metallic shriek as an upper mainmast spreader snagged and came free.

Then they were in the pass, bucking a six-knot current.

The fierce Melanesian sun had burned out but not tanned him, and his nose and cheekbones were peeling. His horn-rimmed glasses had broken at the hinge and been repaired with a piece of tape. He looked eager, boyish, and curiously naive.

One hell-of-a-looking treasure-hunter, the mate thought.

“Glad to see you!” the man called out. “We’d about given you up for lost.”

At the end of the war Vuanu was still deserted. It was not made into a bird sanctuary like Canton Island, or a cable station like Christmas Island, or a refueling point like Cocos-Keeling. No one even wanted to explode alphabet bombs on it.

Vuanu was a worthless, humid, jungle-covered piece of land, free to anyone who wanted it.

William Sorensen, general manager of a chain of liquor stores in California, decided he wanted it.

The mouse bared its tiny teeth and sprang. Eakins knocked it aside.

“Now get the hell out of here,” he said.

He was beginning to wonder if the rodent was crazy. Did it have rabies, perhaps?

The mouse gathered itself for another charge. Eakins lifted the spade off his shoulders and waited. When the mouse sprang, he met it with a carefully timed blow.

Then carefully, regretfully, he battered it to death.

“Can’t have rabid mice running around,” he said.

“Can’t have rabid mice running around,” he said.

But the mouse hadn’t seemed rabid; it had just seemed very determined.

Eakins scratched his head. Now what, he wondered, had gotten into that little mouse?

There was a long silence. Then Eakins’ voice, low-pitched and calm, came over the walkie-talkie.

“We’ll speak with you again later,” Eakins said. “We must take consultation now and decide what to do with you.”

There was no answer from the other end of the walkie-talkie.

Returning to their camp, the men were in a mood of thorough depression. They couldn’t understand what had happened to Eakins and they didn’t feel like speculating on it. The ravaging afternoon sun beat down, reflecting heat back from the white sand.

The damp jungle steamed, and appeared to creep toward them like a huge and sleepy green dragon, trapping them against the indifferent sea.

Gun barrels grew too hot to touch, and the water in the canteens was as warm as blood. Overhead, thick gray cumulus clouds began to pile up; it was the beginning of the monsoon season.

“We’re here,” Drake said. “What did that damned bug do to you?”

“Nothing,” Eakins said. “You are talking to that bug now. My name is the Quedak.”

“My God,” Drake said to Sorensen, “that bug must have hypnotized him!”

“I am sorry,” the Quedak said. “The Quedak Mission must be fulfilled. You will not join us willingly?”

“Then we will join you,” the Quedak said.

There was a click as he turned off the walkie-talkie.

“The hell you say,” Drake growled. “For all you know, it’s got a hole punched right through it. How do you plan on getting off the island, Quedak? Or are you just going to stay here?”

“I will leave at the proper time,” the Quedak said. “I want to make sure that we all leave together.”

The wind died. Huge gray thunderheads piled up in the sky to the southeast, their tops lost in the upper atmosphere, their black anvil bottoms pressing the hot still air upon the island. The sun had lost its fiery glare.

“Hunt him out and kill him.”

“The damned thing is about the size of your thumb,” Sorensen said irritably. “How can we hunt him?”

“We’ll figure out something,” Drake said. He was beginning to get worried about Sorensen. The morale among the men was low enough without Sorensen pushing it down further.