So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.” Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s small has emigrated, don’t you think?
If you’ll remember, helping people was one of the two basic things Fat has been told long ago to give up; helping people and taking dope. He had stopped taking dope, but all his energy and enthusiasm were now totally channeled into saving people. Better he had kept on with the dope.
It looks,” Lotze said, gazing down, “as if it was designed by a Jew.
It’s easy for you people here; you live a safe, purposeless life, nothing to do, nothing to worry about.
The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues – he.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
They know a million tricks, those novelists.
Without war the lower elements of mankind have increased all out of proportion. They threaten the educated few, those with scientific knowledge and training, the ones equipped to direct society. They have no regard for science or a scientific society, based on reason. And this Movement seeks to aid and abet them. Only when scientists are in full control can the –.
Body of yin, soul of yang. Metal and fire unified. The outer and inner; microcosmos in my palm.
Most of it has probably gone into erad by now, but they may have a few terminal typescript manuscripts.
It’s – it’s a variable.” Kaplan was shaking, white-lipped and pale. “Something from which no inference can be made. The man from the past. The machines can’t deal with him. The variable man!
We talked for a while about the area, and then I told Nat about a paper I had written in college about the Roman general Stilicho.
Because when the death-dealing powers of ice and cold reach your loins, your breasts and hips and buttocks as well as your heart – it was already deep in her heart, surely – then there will be no more woman. And you won’t survive that. No matter what I or any man chooses to do.
Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself – they were the hope of the world.
But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.
It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick.
It is the human phosphene response to full-spectrum white, to pure sunlight.
I’m sorry, she thought. But she said nothing. I can’t save you or anybody else from being dark. She thought of Frank. I wonder if he’s dead yet. Said the wrong things; spoke out of line. No, she thought. Somehow he likes Japs. Maybe he identifies with them because they’re ugly. She had always told Frank that he was ugly. Large pores. Big nose. Her own skin was finely knit, unusually so. Did he fall dead without me? A fink is a finch, a form of bird. And they say birds die.
The universe will never be extinguished because just when the darkness seems to have smothered all, to be truly transcendent, the new seeds of light are reborn in the very depths.
It’s all on the surface. Advantage of wealth and power makes this available to them, but it’s ersatz as the day is long.