Launch uninterested selfish
He doesnt like machinery. Unbeknownst to the great powers on Earth, the Martians were holding a summit meeting of their own on the Mars Bar Canal. "Her career?" He mistrusted nature in the raw. His first experience of its treachery had included being stung by a wasp, blundering innocently into a bed of nettles and being chased by a cow. The result of this encounter, a supposed treat that had been provided by his parents when he was six years old, had been to instill a deep loathing of all things green and insect-ridden. Concrete, plastic and the metallic hubbub of urban existence formed his natural habitat, and he was unhappy away from it. The travelling necessitated by his lecturing chores was a nuisance, but he simply stuffed himself with tranquillizers and kept his eyes firmly closed most of the time between cities. Frustrated, Sabina directed the hack driver to take her to Pacific Heights. The same uniformed maid opened the door at the Egan residence. When she recognized Sabina, her reaction was odd: eyes widening and then narrowing as if she was suddenly uneasy. She said,Mrs. Egan is not... available, and promptly shut the door in Sabinas face. He-Who-Must-Mock-in-the-Temple—you go shod on holy ground. "Youre gonna use your gun to keep me here?" Youll do it? He looked as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down, and settled his check and hustled me to the door and found a cab and we were on the way to the airport before I really knew what was happening.* * * * (This one hit a nerve.Better is a judgment made by people after the fact of their own decisions. Or there isnt any “Better.” As for the Recalcitrants, of which vague class of living creatures we are members, they were and are certainly both more and less something than the others were—the City people—the ones who elected to Go Along with the Organization. Of all the original Recalcitrant families, I would guess that not ten per cent are now alive. I would if I had any use for statistics. If these people had something in common, you would have to go light-years away to find a name for it. I think it was a common lack of something—a disease perhaps. Future generations will take credit for it and refer to their origins as Fine Old Stock. I think most of them were crazy. I am glad they were, but most of them were just weird. Southern California. I have told Chris about the Peters family. They were going to make it on nothing but papaya juice and stewed grass augmented by East Indian breathing exercises. Poor squittered-out souls! Their corpses were like balsa wood. Better? What is Better? Grandfather was going to live on stellar emanations and devote his energies to whittling statues out of fallen redwoods. Thank Nature his stomach had other ideas! And God I’m tired and fed up!) Umn, she said; he felt her falling away, diminishing, receding into the void of sleep. At the last possible instant before total unconsciousness, she murmured: He stood up. He walked around his desk. He hovered above me and glared down. (A hard trick, even when Im in a low chair.) I looked up again at the dark billows hanging like shrouds above the white villa. "Clouds, Beatrice? Those are tigers, tigers with wings. Were manicurists of the air, not dragon-tamers." Hartford glanced at his watch, and gave a whistle of alarm.Time to pack, he said. “Ive got to be at that unpronounceable airport of yours by six. There’s no chance, I suppose, that you can fly over to Macao and see us sometime?” Chier-cuala couldnt understand. Sabinas memory stirred. She leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. It wasn’t long before a small, grim smile lifted the corners of her mouth. Quickly she rose, donned her hat, coat, and muffler, and left the office, locking the door again behind her. June 30—A week since I dared to write again. Its slipping away like sand through my fingers. Most of the books I have are too hard for me now. I get angry with them because I know that I read and understood them just a few weeks ago. Bah! says Mr. Wilier again. With a snap of his fingers he produces some flash paper which, at the touch of flame from a palmed match, flares brightly for a moment. Its one tiny recalcitrant beacon of.stability and permanence in the whole of the madly whirling, wild and evolving universe. Undoubtedly, said Mr. Spardleton. But todays crackpot is sometimes tomorrow’s genius. Besides, crackpot patents would do no harm; we have them now. The good ones, if any, would reap the usual rewards. The whole situation would stimulate people to invent for the future. Nothing but good would come of it.” Freida stammered:But its only two-thirty . .. By hook or crook then, I was almost safely through the second phase of my journey. For, awesome as the interstellar reaches may be to the lone traveler, or even to the caravan which must track those Saharas of cosmic dust, there had come a point in my journey when it was the destination which became the dread. Did they really have water in a liquid state? I could not survive without it. Should I have trusted them, when they reported themselves as beings with the same needs as I, molded by the same natural forces? Not that I was suspicious of their intent— but after all, they were only a third-generation star. Young as they were, must one not have a low view of intellectual powers which had taken all of their history to discover other presences, and the possible pulsings between them? Granted We and They had mutually significant symbols and meanings, but imagine Our dismay when informed that they still read and wrote! Could beings like Us, who are in Ourselves practicallyall electronic meaning, go backward as far as these beings on the other side of their Milky Way thought they had gone forward; could we mutate enough, and quickly so, to touch arc on their planet? To dare to do this, I had gone against all home Opinion. And so far, with the help of arrangements-in-waiting, plans had gone remarkably. But, as I peered outside that glass door, I remembered my misgivings just a few moments before landing. Behind me, improbably far along the empyrean reaches, Ours, that long teardrop of a planet, lay somewhere shrouded as I had last seen it, nestling deep in its filtered atmospheres, a jewel once upon a time massively wept. As I had reined in on Yours, a mere toy ball lost on its cloud stubble, waiting to be picked up again in play— my last thought had been: yes, I can land Here — but can I live?.
