Because great wealth is a curse – unless you enjoy money-making for its own sake. Even then it has serious drawbacks.
She called out, “All stations manned and ready, Captain!” He looked at her and grinned. “Stand by to raise ship!” She answered, “Board green! Clear from tower! Ready for count off!” “Minus thirty! Twenty-nine – twenty-eight – ” He broke off and added sheepishly, “It does feel good.
How can I be sure? I’m a doctor, not a fortune-teller.
I see. Well – got everything you want?” “Yes,” admitted Monroe-Alpha, “unless you should happen to have concealed, somewhere about your person, a hypersphere, a hypersurface, and some four-dimensional liquid, suitable for fine lubrication.
Thirty-seven days out Fuzzy Britches had eight golden little kittens, exactly like their parent but only a couple of inches across when flat, marble-sized when contracted. Everyone including Captain Stone thought they were cute; everyone enjoying petting them, stroking them with a gentle forefinger and listening carefully for the tiny purr, so high as to be almost beyond human ear range. Everyone enjoyed feeding them and they seemed to be hungry all the time.
Could it be that every one of all religions is true?
But I could if I took the time and sweat to learn the language of electronics; it’s not miraculous – just complex. Teleportation is simple, once you learn the language – it’s the language that is difficult.
No. ‘Grok’ is the most important word in the language – and I expect to spend years trying to understand it.
Respect for laws is a pragmatic matter. Women know this instinctively; that’s why they are all smugglers. Men often believe – or pretend – that the ‘Law’ is something sacred, or at least a science.
I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.
What was “grokking”? He had been using the word for a week – and he didn’t grok it. But what was “Man”? A featherless biped? God’s image? Or a fortuitous result of “survival of the fittest” in a circular definition? The heir of death and taxes? The Martians seemed to have defeated death, and they seemed not to have money, property, nor government in any human sense – so how could they have taxes?
Dad would haul down a book and we’d look it up. Then he would try four or five more with other opinions. Dad doesn’t hold with the idea that it-must-be-true-or-they-wouldn’t-have-printed-it; he doesn’t consider any opinion sacred – it shocked me the first time he took out a pen and changed something in one of my math books.
Well – I feel so damn useless!
I have taken lots of orders, some of which I shouldn’t have, but I had never yet taken orders from a piece of machinery. “Go climb a rope!” I said. “You’ll have to drag me.” This is not what to say to a robot. It did.
Aussies and Enzees and black fellows and marys and Malays and Tamil and name it.
Well, we’re on the Moon.
Wherever there is power and mass to manipulate, Man can live.
If a table has four legs, which one can you afford to throw away?
You!” “Uh huh. Me. Old calm-as-a-cat Felix. It’s going to take hold, I tell you. It’s going to be popular. We’ll sell permissions to view it physically and then all sorts of lesser rights – direct pick-up, recording, and so forth. Smith has a lot of ideas about identifying various combinations with cities and organizations and attaching color symbols to them and songs and things. He’s full of ideas – an amazing young man, for a barbarian.
You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the soldier and the civilian?” “The difference,” I answered carefully, “lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.