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You waited there, warm and dry, he went on, for his return from the Hotel Grant with the satchel. He locked both the entrance to the cigar store and the inside door leading to his quarters. You made haste to convince him by one means or another to let you have the satchel. Then you left him, again through the rear door, no doubt with instructions to lock and bar it behind you.” Oh, its an easy language to understand. Simple. Few words, you know. Few tenses, few conjugations. Not that I’m any sort of a language specialist. We have several of them dropping in on us, including the great Professor Reardon, the etymologist. . . . I’m just—well, I’m just a model maker at heart. Not a professional man at all. I started as a child of eight, making a model of the old American Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe steam railway, as it would have been in the early years of last century. Historic Man, guided by the recorded increment of wonders noted (resolved or unsolved), harnessed the energies of wind and water, grouped with his kin to raise up walls of stone, to stop the enemy before the battle; lived longer and more leisurely; learned to think in abstractions; devised mental tools—logic, morality, philosophy; made new tools with which to peer through at the macro-and micro-cosmic realms of the gods and devils. He saw the magnificent orderliness of the universe; banished wonder and base superstition together; rejoiced, and proclaimed the Age of Reason. Good morning, Sabina. Not a day for bicycling, is it? Benedict bought Madeline a diamond bracelet. Dr. Armstrongs voice said something. It was a pleasant light tenor voice, a little anxious. Go all the way, I figured.You either lose or you win—everything! See, Daddy? Dark! Not if I have my druthers, Quincannon thought.Will you be meeting him? "Chéri." She said."Chéri." A male consex? I would go back to the house and then I would follow the path around the rocks to the hot springs, and there I would peel off what was left of my clothes and I would soak myself in the clear but pungent water that came bubbling—perfect—from a cleft in the rocks to form a pool in the hollow of a pothole—also perfect. And while I steeped in the mineral water I could think about the fish which was soon to be broiling on the fire, and I could think of Sue turning it, poking at it and sprinkling herbs over it as though it was the first or perhaps the last fish that would ever be broiled and eaten by human creatures. She would perform that office with the same total and unreserved dedication with which, since sun-up, she had scraped deerskin, picked worms from new cabbage-leaves, gathered firewood, caulked the walls of the cabin where the old chinking had fallen away or been chewed or knocked away by other hungry or merely curious creatures, and otherwise filled in the numberless gaps in the world—trivial things mostly which would not be noticed and could not become great things in a mans eyes unless shewere to go away or cease to be. I don’t think of this because, for all immediate purposes—there are no others—she is the first Woman in the world and quite possibly—the last. Where? Just walls, the wash basin—the radiator! It was too warm a day for the heat to be on and perhaps there was room behind—there it was! They had started unhappily, with Swanwick teetotal, and none too good a lunch served in the canteen in his honor, and an antipathy between them that neither had quite the will to overcome. Who? No. The quotation is from Of Men and Galaxies by cosmologist (and SF writer) Fred Hoyle, who argues that human evolution is no longer determined by the physical environment, but bythe things we know and the things we believe. ... We cannot think outside the patterns that our brains are conditioned to, or to be more accurate, we can think only a little outside, and then only if we are very original. And, “New concepts are like genetic mutations . . . most of them turnout badly. But without mutations there can be no evolution.” WALT GROVE:John Greens Little Angel, Plby, July..
