Short Science Fiction quotes

Jeffrey looked at him gravely. “

War with men is primitive. Lives can’t be replaced.

”

I could have taken that three hundred dollars and gone to school for a year, by washing dishes two hours a night.

I had worked for that money, too; shocking wheat for twelve hours a day in the August sun is no vacation. But Slim Coleman convinced me that we could run that three hundred into enough to take us both for four years.

I saw Slim melting down. I didn’t blame him.

That girl could have melted tungsten.

Yes, I recognized her from her pictures in the society section—the mayor’s wife.

The Bryd sighed.

These humans were so unstable, so impulsive.

The Bryd took a look around.

Reluctantly the Bryd checked again, and found that that was exactly what Dale Stevenson was about to do. The Bryd wondered why. It groaned.

Humans were always up to something. Why couldn’t they relax so the Bryd could rest?

The Bryd had been so happy back in 2250—or let’s see, was it up in 2250? (This was 2045.) That was when Bob What’s-his-name and that cute girl had landed on Pluto and given him a chance to get away.

The girl was getting ready to kill herself. The Bryd probed into her mind for an instant and discovered that she wasn’t being a martyr and had no complexes; she was just trying to straighten things out for Dale and Ann.

Oh, beans, thought the Bryd. If humans weren’t the dumbest beings ever!

It watched Marillyn raise the bottle to her lips. It simultaneously took the form of a nurse, standing there at Marillyn’s side, and Marillyn gasped and said, “Oh, nurse, I didn’t know you were there.”

It went into her mind and did some repair work that would have amazed the finest brain surgeons on Earth. In a few months Marillyn’s paralysis would be gone and she would be well and happy.

Miracles, did they say? Well, they’d asked for it.

The Bryd was somewhat irked with itself for having interfered—but it had been for the best.

The kid had put the finger on him. It was the first time Relegar had ever done that. Those damned eyes! Relegar must know what Grant had found, and the knowledge that the Uranian knew about the stones made him weak.

Relegar was a bad spider.

Grant’s impulse was to run but he forced himself to be steady. Now he didn’t dare go straight to Netse. He went on to Nellie’s place and hammered on the door. “Oh, it’s you. Come on in.” Nellie opened the door.

He turned his light on the pool where the saurian had been, and shuddered. The water was dull red, and alive with creatures fighting each other to get to the carcass. The surface was covered with flying things, some small, some huge, all fighting, fighting.

Life on Venus was an eternal, bloody fight.

This slaughter, once started, would go on for weeks, until the fighting creatures in this immediate area of the swamp were exhausted.

“Something to do besides—well, some kind of mark to aim at, I guess. This point business is just putting in time. I’m not creating anything. Even if I could fasten zippers on featherbeds, I’d be doing something worth while, because it’d be used.

But this way of living is like digging a hole and then filling it in again.

Why, you don’t even dare to get into a fight. Somebody would collect a thousand points every time you hit him. The standard price of a black eye is three thousand. You have to be pretty careful about things like that. And there’s always Conley.”

“Oh, you don’t need to. I earned it; I’ve got it coming. I was just a little too ambitious, that’s all.

I didn’t know a man could be too ambitious.

”

High-Pockets also had organized the proofreaders and copyholders, and they were reading in the past also, and sending us proofs in the present.

If anybody ever tells you they can’t get seventeen hundred galleys of type a day out of six linecasting machines⁠—well, they just don’t know High-Pockets Jones.

“Of course,” he said apologetically, “they’ll want to be paid.”

The attorney spoke up. “Mr. Shane,” he said, “I think the affairs of the Imperial Printing Company are in perilous circumstances. I do not know what is the meaning of this, but certainly there is something here without precedent.”

And if you know lawyers, you know that anything without precedent is very unholy.

I told what we had done, but he was interested in only one thing. “Think what a combined suit by these nine-er-twins here would do.”

“So long,” I said. I was sorry to see him go. I locked up the shop—but first I cut off all the power and got a pig and smashed up Dr. Hudson’s coils and transformers.

I wanted to come down in the morning without seeing double.

Even now he felt the lightly restraining touch of Lennat’s thought-force, a little dulled by long disuse. He felt grateful for Lennat’s interest, and yet he had an idea that was more than just that—it was an ideal.

Dalen wanted to see a species evolve that could temper intelligence with sentiment.

Dalen’s belief was that intelligence alone, even the unusually high forms developed by certain Arachnids and some Centipods, was not the most pleasing form of life.