Voodoo Planet quotes

He wiped one hand absently across his bare chest and brought it away damp as he studied, through protective sun goggles, the treacherous promise of the bright sea. One could swim—if he wanted to lose most of his skin.

There were minute organisms in that liquid that smacked their lips⁠—if they had lips⁠—every time they thought of a Terran.

Dane Thorson licked his own lips, tasting salt, and plodded back through the sand of the spaceport to the berth of the Solar Queen.

The colony was founded by escaped prisoners—and just one racial stock. They took off from Earth close to the end of the Second Atomic War. That was a race war, remember? Which made it doubly ugly.” Tau’s mouth twisted in disgust. “

As if the color of a man’s skin makes any difference in what lies under it!

One side in that lineup tried to take over Africa—herded most of the natives into a giant concentration camp and practiced genocide on a grand scale. Then they were cracked themselves, hard and heavy.

“You have challenged me.” Lumbrilo turned away and then looked back over his shoulder. “The strength you depend upon may become a broken staff, off-worlder.

Remember my words in the time when shadows become substance, and substance the thinnest of shadows!

”

He touched his thumb to his forehead. “So through generations we have developed our homing instincts. Those who did not, also did not live to father others who might have had the same lack.

We are hounds who can run on a scent, and we are migrators who have better than a compass within our own bodies.

”

But Asaki had already grasped the situation, was looking ahead.

“We shall not know,” he breathed, “what is real, what is not.”

“There is also this,” Tau warned. “The unreal can kill the believer just as quickly as the real!”

“We shall not know,” he breathed, “what is real, what is not.”

“There is also this,” Tau warned. “The unreal can kill the believer just as quickly as the real!”

“That I know also. It has happened too many times lately. If we could only find out how! Here are no drums, no singing—none of the tricks to tangle a man’s mind that he usually uses to summon his demons.

Captain Jellico gave a bark of laughter colored only by the most sardonic humor. “

Clever enough. He merely leaves it to us to select our own ghost and then repeat the performance in the next proper setting.

I wonder how many rocks shaped like that one there are in these mountains? And how long will a rock ape continue to pop out from behind each one we do find?”

The unseen was cold; it sapped a man’s strength, bit at his brain, weighted his hands and feet, weakened him. It strove to soften him into clay another could remold.

Nothingness, darkness, all that was opposed to life and warmth and reality, arose in the night, gathered together against them.

Yet still Tau fronted that invisible wave, his head high. And between his sturdily planted feet the knife gleamed bright with a radiance of its own.

“

I am not clay to be molded by your hands, Lumbrilo.

And now I say that the time has come to call an end—”

“You have fettered yourself with your own bounds.

As you have been the hunter, so shall you now be the hunted.

”