Even a doomed man might reasonably be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand square meters of gems. He.
Because Nature always balances her books, the Sun lost some velocity in the transaction; but the effect would not be measurable for a few thousand years.
The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.
Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it has begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet age had triggered and explosion of global tourism.
How foolish that expectation had been! He knew now that one might as well hope to see the wind, or speculate about the true shape of fire.
Yet if there were no hazards there would be no achievement, no sense of adventure.
The Chairman glared across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometers of space at Conrad Taylor, who reluctantly subsided, like a volcano biding its time.
The room you are about to enter,” the Eagle said, setting up Nicole’s wheelchair, “is the largest single room in this domain. It is half a kilometer across at its widest point. Inside currently is a model of the Milky Way Galaxy.
This was the fundamental problem with rockets – and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.
Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter.
The crew of Apollo 8, who at Christmas, 1968, became the first men ever to set eyes upon the Lunar Farside, told me that they had been tempted to radio back the discovery of a large black monolith: alas, discretion prevailed.
I said nothing about men adapting themselves to Mars. Have you ever considered the possibility of Mars meeting us half-way?
Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroticism in his study of puberty rites in late-twentieth-century Beverly Hills.
Martin’s one of the nicest fellows you could meet, as long as you don’t do it too often.
There was no evidence that the intelligence of the human race had improved, but for the first time everyone was given the fullest opportunity of using what brain he had.
Call it the Star Gate.
I’ve just had an amusing flashback. All these creatures going in the same direction – they look like the commuters who used to surge back and forth twice a day between home and office, before electronics made it unnecessary.
And just fifty years had separated the Wright Brothers from the first jet airliners.
Behind Alystra was the known world, full of wonder yet empty of surprise, drifting like a brilliant but tightly closed bubble down the river of time. Ahead, separated from her by no more than the span of a few footsteps, was the empty wilderness – the world of the desert – the world of the Invaders.
This would involve disconnection – the computer equivalent of death. Despite.