Scintillating mine narrow
He was just finishing the plowing when Sheriff Doyle drove up and got out of the car. The sheriff was a soft-spoken man, but he was no dawdler. He got right to the point. DSE: The Dark Side of the Earth, Alfred Bester (Signet, 1964) What do you want? the Senator repeated. Handsome woman, dark gold hair. Mr. Rideout kept company with her in the city. As soon as she has supper, she can come, said Mom, handling my hours as though they had no value to me. Of course she has to go to school tomorrow.” With that she came to Stalins attention. During the next week or so, he was occupied pacifying the city of Washington, and trying to establish an emergency distribution system. This was his most benevolent phase; I believe he was completely in good faith when he offered free food and clothing to anyone who came to his distribution centers—it wouldnt have been any trick at all for him to produce unlimited quantities of merchandise. However, the population of the city didn’t know that, and it is hardly surprising that they suspected a trap, and left the city rather than take a chance on his generosity. This, I am sure, so infuriated him, that his already weakened mind broke down altogether. In the days that followed, when his only nourishment was the water from the fountains provided at every tenth landing, he thought frequently of food, preparing imaginary meals from the store of groceries he had left behind, savoring the ideal sweetness of the honey, the richness of the soup which he would prepare by soaking the powder in the emptied cookie tin, licking the film of gelatin lining the opened can of corned beef. When he thought of the six cans of tuna fish, his anxiety became intolerable, for he had (would have had) no way to open them. Merely to stamp on them would not be enough. What, then? He turned the question over and over in his head, like a squirrel spinning the wheel in its cage, to no avail. Irrelevant, Quimble would shout. (Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can break. Get busier. Now.) "Never mind." Bleekers chair began its slow rhythm again. "Hows that chess player getting along? Alec Cord?" Simple obscenity. It now appeared that she intended to travel all the way to Stockton. To meet Noah Rideout there or for some other purpose? And just who the devil was the fellow whod boarded at Kennett’s Crossing? Purnie paid little attention to the antics of his friend; he was beyond understanding. He wondered what they would say at home when he returned. Tyburn blinked, and unexpectedly a wall seemed to go down in his mind. I suppose weve really created something like the garden of Eden here, Scarfe muttered to himself, peering into the nearest vacant scanner. In his crafty old mind, he began to devise a new and more alluring advertisement for his establishment, one that would not offend his scientific customers, but would rope in the sensation-loving public. Lost Tribes in the Pocket-Size Garden of Eden . . . They’re All Together in the Altogether . . .” The United States delegate scowled.Well, we can still stick pins in maps and draw pictures. Eventually we can get across what we mean. Until that moment, our instructor had talked of migrations across the Bering Strait during the Ice Ages. She had talked of Mongoloid traits, of longheads and roundheads, of layers of piled life, of seed gatherers and grinders, of modified basket-making peoples, of theanasazi—the ancient ones. When I first came to Libo, I accepted the goonie as an animal, a mere source of food. It was Company policy not to attempt a colony where there was no chance for self-support. Space shipping-rates made it impossible to supply a colony with food for more than a short time while it was being established. Those same shipping-rates make it uneconomical to ship much in the way of machinery, to say nothing of luxuries. A colony has to have an indigenous source of food and materials, and if any of that can also be turned into labor, all the better. I knew that. I accepted it as a matter of course..
