Algis Budrys

“ What kind of war had it been, that there would still be Americans to be hated in Berlin in 1958? How long could it possibly have lasted, to account for so many old buildings gone? What had pounded Germany so cruelly? And yet even the "new" buildings were genuinely some years old. Why an American? Why not an Englishman or Frenchman?
He walked the gray streets, looking with a numb sense of settling shock at this grim Berlin. He saw men in shapeless uniform caps, brown trousers, cheap boots and sleazy blue shirts. ”

“ She added softly: "My name, though you did not ask, is Adelie." She paused. "I, too, am one of your worshippers. Wherever there are human beings, throughout the Universe, you are worshipped."
He looked at her more closely. There was a lift to one black-winged eyebrow that was less reverent than a god might like, though a man could have no quarrel with it. She stood gracefully on sandaled feet, dressed in a single white garment girdled around her waist by a belt made of the same metal in which the monsters were cast. ”

“ That other female people had been ugly or old, that the same unforgotten force that urged her up the mountain path had brought others here before her, meant only that she was incapable of accepting the verdict of the years that had thinned her pelt, dimmed her eyes, and broken the smooth rhythm of her gait.
In short, it meant that Riya Sair, granddam times over, spurned by every male on the old range, was willing to cross the gray mountains and risk death from the resentful wild dams for the thin hope that there was a male among the wildlings who would sire her calf. ”

“ No ship in the System had ever hit the speed I begged out of my ship's heaving engines. No human being had ever traveled as fast before, tracing his track across the white stars in the blue fire of his jets.
If I made it to Titan in time to get into hyperspace, I would have Pat with me. There'd be stars to look at, and the worlds that circled them. Star on star, marching past the ship, world after spinning world, fair against the stars, and a million things to see, a thousand lifetimes to live. ”

“ And from the moment you had one, you were a free man. You were an army to defend your rights. And when everybody had one—when Direct Power accumulators lighted your house, drove your plane, let you create building materials, food, clothing out of any cheap, plentiful substance; when you needed no Ministry of Supply, no Board of Welfare Supervision, no Bureau of Employment Allocation, no Ministry of the Interior, no National Police—when all these things were as they were, then the world was free. ”

“ And know, Marlowe, that the other races of the universe hate you."
Marlowe with a tremendous effort heaved himself out of his chair.
"Hate us?" He lumbered around the desk and advanced on the frightened Dovenilid, who was retreating backwards before his path.
"Can't you see it? Don't you understand that, if we are to pursue any course of action over a long time—if we are ever going to achieve a galaxy in which an Earthman can some day live at peace with himself—we must each day violate all the moral codes and creeds which we held inviolate the day before? ”

“ The Barbarian laughed again, this time in pure amusement. "Because I'm not going to kill you, obviously. You're too good a cannoneer to be despatched by a belt knife. No—no, lad, I'm not planning to kill anyone for some time. All I want right now is to get out of here and get home. I've got another army to raise, to make up for this pasting you Leaguesmen have just given me."
"Next time, you won't be so lucky," Geoffrey muttered. "We'll see your hide flapping in the rain, if you're ever foolish enough to raid our lands again." ”

“ Even more, he admired his cleverness in having it built. A clever man always has a back door. He crossed the hangar floor unhurriedly, and climbed into the ship.
The control room was small, but efficient. A hundred controls lay closely around the padded chair, some of them for the standard drive, others for the hyperspatial warp.
The hyperspatial warp! Merssu smiled. There was his escape—and more. Here were the means for his future rulership over nothing so small as the Cloud—here were entire galaxies waiting for his hand.
Hyperspace! There was something to make a man think! ”

“ Dragging himself from handhold to handhold, his tendons cracking with the strain, he levered himself toward the Crash Capsule, forced open its hatch and pulled himself through, while the winds of Venus tore at the shattered hull and the scream of Defiance's passage through the murky sky rose to a savage howl.
Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now. ”

“ I am an honored citizen of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Hitler is thirteen years dead in his auto accident, and the new chancellor is a different sort of man. He has promised us no war with the Americans. We have peace, and triumph, and these create a different sort of atmosphere than do war and desperation. We have relaxed, now. We have the fruit of our victory—what do we not have, in our empire of a thousand years? Western civilization is safe at last from the hordes of the East. ”

“ MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. "You were the best there was—but you'd done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn't take the chance, Ish!" ”

“ Which side had tried to over-power the first chrysalis? Who first enslaved another man? he thought, and half-snarled.
That, too, was unimportant now. For the seed had been planted. The thought was there. Those who are awake can place those who sleep under obligation. Control the chrysalids, and you control the sleepers within. But chrysalids endure for one generation, and then the sleepers pass on. ”

“ Kimmensen glanced at his clock.
It was a great responsibility, he was thinking to himself. I remember how confused everything was. How surprised we were to discover, after the old regime was smashed, that many of us had been fighting for utterly different things.
That had been the most important thing he'd had to learn; that almost everyone was willing to fight and die to end the old regime, but that once the revolution was won, there were a score of new regimes that had waited, buried in the hearts of suppressed men, to flower out and fill the vacuum. ”

“ Riya stiffened in alarm. The calf was straying. The knowledge was relayed from her mother-centers to the telepathic functions.
Stop. You cannot go there. You must be with your mother. You are not grown. Stop. Stay with me. I will protect you. I love you.
The universe shuddered. Phildee adjusted frantically. Cutting through the delicately maintained reality concept was a scrambling, jamming frequency of thought. In terror, he flung himself backward into Riya's world. Standing completely still, he probed frantically into Riya's mind. ”

“ Greaves, Adelie and Vigil stood beside the beast-couch. "All right," Greaves said. "Now there are things I want to know, and I want no quarrels, Vigil."
"And by what right do you order me around?" the old man growled. "You may be a god to some, but you are not my god."
"You owe it to me, atheist. If I was awakened today, at this pat moment, I could have been awakened before. I wasn't. You kept me asleep, guardian, when I could have been free as any other man. So you owe me."
The old man grunted. "You're brave with Mayron and brave with me. But all men are brave, each in his own way. ”

“ Some day, when the Union was contiguous with the entire galaxy, men would still call Washington, on old, out-of-the-way Earth, their capital. Man was not a rigorously logical race, as a race.
The thought of going home broke out afresh, insidiously avoiding the barriers of bemusement which he had tried to erect, and he turned abruptly away from the window, moving decisively so as to be able to move at all. He yanked open a desk drawer and stuffed his jacket pockets with candy bars, ripping the film from one and chewing on its end while he put papers in his brief case. ”

“ Most important, I could finally understand what was wrong with Thorsten. I could see the Messiah complex building up in front of my eyes. The laugh—the easy, chuckling, self-assured laugh—the laugh of a man who was never wrong, and knew it.
"I've got the drive, Holcomb, and I'm going to use it. I'll be the standard-bearer of the human race among the stars. There won't be any fumbling and bumbling—no bureaucrats, Holcomb, no splinter groups, no special interests, no lobbies." ”

“ We are here to choose between a life of peace and harmony, a life in which no man is oppressed in any way by any other, a life of fellowship, a life of peaceful trade, a life of shared talents and ideals—or a life of rigid organization, of slavery to a high-sounding phrase and a remorseless system of government that fits its subjects to itself rather than pattern itself to meet their greatest good. ”

“ Merssu thundered. "I am the Firegod! Look on my power!" Once more he fired into the sea, and once more the steam pillars rose. "I am the God of Fire. I fly in the hands of flame. I walk on the air. I burn the land and the sea. I am Merssu!"
The priest's face lost its tolerant amusement. His mouth twisted in scorn.
"Walk on the air, do you? In a Mark XI Antigrav belt, yes. Burn sea and land, eh? With a sungun, certainly. Fly in hands of flame? If you wish to be picturesque about it, yes—but so does every drunken fool of a spaceman."
"I tell you, I am Merssu!" Merssu screamed. ”

“ Vigil said bitterly.
"Mayron that is First of Shadows," the empty-skinned thing replied proudly, and began to weep great, black tears that soon emptied it, so that the skin drooped down into a huddle on the pave and a black cloud in the shape of a man stood sparkling in the dusk before Greaves. "Mayron that will again be First of Men, when all men are shadows. Mayron that is already First of many men. And which of us is a god, David Greaves?"
Adelie's face glowed with excitement. ”

“ Even another fighting man, like you, Holcomb, thinks I'm a renegade and a traitor to humanity for throwing in with the Marties. Well, they're blind, Holcomb!"
His open palm came cracking down on the table. "They can't see that Earth is rotten to the very marrow in its mis-shapen bones, that any system that would do to a man what it did to me is based on stupid bungling! The war—Holcomb, you were in that, you know it was the most useless piece of imperialism the System has ever seen." ”

“ No one else in the group of nobles paid the two of them any attention. No one had time to spare for any quarrel but his own, and the whole squabbling pile of them looked ready to fly apart at any moment—to draw sidearms and knives and flare into spiteful combat.
The Barbarian spat quietly. "There's your Seaboard League, lad. There's your convocation of free men. Step out there and ask for your lands back. Care to try?"
"We've already decided that wouldn't be wise," Geoffrey said irritably. ”

“ An Earthman's promise—expressed in words or deeds—is good only at the instant he makes it. A second later, new factors have entered into the total circumstances, and a new chain of logic has formed in his head—to be altered again, a few seconds later."
He thought, suddenly, of that poor claustrophobic devil, Holliday, harried from planet to planet, never given a moment's rest—and civilizing, civilizing, spreading the race of humankind wherever he was driven. ”

“ His father smiled thinly. "What?" he asked patronizingly.
"I'm a rocket pilot," the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of his cheeks.
His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and hate. "Yeah," he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor with an unnoticed stiff rustle.
"A rocket pilot!" His father's derision hooted through the quiet parlor. "A ro—oh, no!—a rocket pilot!" ”

“ I was born in a world where half a billion human beings lived for a generation in worship—in worship—of a man. I was born in a world where that one twisted man could tell a lie and send gigantic armies charging into death, screaming that lie. I was born to huddle, to be a cipher in a crowd, to be spied on, to be regulated, to be hammered to meet the standard so the standard lie would fit me. ”

“ And how the Americans, with their dollars, had poured out countless tons of equipment to make up for their inability to fight. How, at the last, the vulture fleets of bombers had rumbled inexhaustibly across the sky, killing, killing, killing, until all the German homes and German families had been destroyed. And how now the Americans, with their hellish bomb that had killed a hundred thousand Japanese civilians, now bestrode the world and tried to bully it, with their bombs and their dollars, into final submission. ”

“ Geoffrey and Dugald stared expressionlessly at each other. The Barbarian kept his eyes on Geoffrey's face. "That's right," he said. "Can't have two men fight to the death without one of them coming out alive, usually."
The tribesmen lived in wooden cabins tucked away among trees and hidden in narrow little valleys. Geoffrey was surprised to see windmills, and wire fencing for the cattle pastures that adjoined their homes. He was even more interested in their rifles, which, the tribesmen told him, were repeaters. ”

“ She looked up at me. "Harry says there's another planet out in hyperspace, somewhere, circling another star. He says people can live on it." Her eyes were shining, and I remembered a girl on a terrace, back at the Academy, with a dream in her voice that I'd been too dumb to recognize.
"He does, does he? Can he prove it? How do you know what he's really going to do?"
"Because he's told me!" she flared. "He's going to by-pass the fumbling bureaucrats who run things on Earth and take mankind out to the stars—mankind, Ash, the toughest, the strongest men in space, and their women. ”

“ The god who was David Greaves again, when the rage had passed—that image which Man himself had made stood blazing his fury in the Chamber of Shadows, and the Universe of Man was free and safe. But in the places of the Shadows there was no hope, no joy, no place of refuge. Mankind was come forth, and galaxies were dying. ”

“ There's no Utopia with room for men like you and me, and yet we're here. We're constantly being born. So there's a choice—kill us, burn us down, or smash your Utopia. And you can't kill more than one generation of us."
Messerschmidt's eyes were brooding. ”

“ The driver cocked an eyebrow at Marlowe and chuckled. "Say, Fatso, which one of you's the Buick?" Then the light changed, the car spurted away, and left Marlowe cringing.
He would not get an official car and protect himself with its license number. He would not be a coward. He would not!
His fingers shaking, he tore the film from another candy bar.
Marlowe huddled in his chair, the notebook clamped on one broad thigh by his heavy hand, his lips mumbling nervously while his pencil-point checked off meter.
"Dwell in aching discontent," he muttered. "No. Not that." ”

“ A man of science, after all—a thinking, reasoning man—could not let himself descend to emotional levels. Professor Kempfer was embarrassed to think that Tanzler might believe this sort of lapse was typical of him.
"Who am I," he tried to explain, "to be judge and jury over a whole nation—an empire? Who is one man, to decide good and evil? I look at these youngsters, and I envy them with all my heart. To be young; to find all the world arranged in orderly fashion for one's special benefit ”

“ An untailed fox is safe from catching by the tail. A Shadow has no spirit, no humanity, no—soul. But there are always dunderheads. Mayron has them, and down in that city of his down there—" the old man waved a hand at the horizon, but all Greaves could see from where he stood were the glowing tops of what he took to be three fitfully active volcanoes—"he has a city full of dunderheaded shadows who go to some temple he has built and enter the Shadow chamber to be changed. The admission is easily gained; the price of freedom from human care is humanity." ”

“ Packed into this ship was an entire civilization, ready to be brought to whatever people Merssu chose. He had only to enter hyperspace and lose himself where no Earthman or rebel could follow, and there he would find a primitive race, barely beginning to rise out of the mud. He would bring them civilization. In return, he would have—Godhood!
They would worship him, those primitive people. He would be Merssu the Firegod, thundering out of the sky, bringing with him the gift of civilization. ”

“ Marlowe looked at him, his eyes full of years.
"Ud Klavan," he said, "you are quite right. We are a race of maniacs. And that is why Earthmen rule the galaxy. For our treaties are not binding, and our promises are worthless. Our government does not represent our people. It represents our people as they once were. The delay in the democratic process is such that the treaty signed today fulfills the promise of yesterday—but today the Body Politic has formed a new opinion, is following a new logic which is completely at variance with that of yesterday. ”

“ He was the man Josef Kimmensen had chosen to replace him as president of the Freemen's League.
The building itself was left over from the old regime. It was perhaps unfortunate—Kimmensen had often debated the question with himself—to risk the associations that clung to this building. But a building is only a building, and the dust of years chokes the past to death. It was better to work here than to build a new set of offices. It might seem a waste to leave a still-new building, and that might tend to make people linger after their jobs had finished themselves. ”

“ I opened my hands, and saw blood running over my knuckles where the tape had torn away. There was some of my blood on her dress, where I'd grabbed her shoulder.
"Ash! Please—I'm sorry—It—it's just that I didn't know what to think."
I don't know how I got over to her, but then I had my arms around her, and she was digging her teeth into the cloth of my shoulder, and sobbing.
"Pat, why do you have to be this way? Why can't you—" I was saying, and stroking that red-brown hair. She wasn't a tough, self-assured woman who could gun a man down without blinking. ”

“ Greaves said.
"The city that was once the First City of Man," Vigil said bitterly. "That Mayron has made into an outpost of Hell. Where no man dares live; where they say that those with Shadows, once they were in sufficient number, dragged women and children into the Chamber of Shadows so that their men, heart-broken, joined them when their Shadow-children returned to plead with them." ”

“ When he returned, that world would be his, and soon afterward the entire universe would bow before the name of Merssu, the immortal Firegod, for there is no force so strong, no loyalty so great, as that of men for their gods. ”

“ You take a child from the age of five; you teach it to love the State, to revere the Leader; you inform it that it is the wave of the future, much cleverer than the decadent past but not quite intelligent enough to rule itself. You teach it that there must be specialists in government—Experts in Economy, Directors of Internal Resources, Ministers of Labor Utilization. ”

“ There were a few in the Asteroids, hooked up with renegade Marties, and one or two that had actually grabbed sections of Mars.
Sending regular law enforcement officers or Marines after each one of these boys would have been physically impossible. Earth government had come up with a cuter idea.
It was a lot more economical to fight one big decisive battle than to endure a series of inconclusive skirmishes. There were a lot of us boys out in space, most of us just drifting from one port to the next, picking up a living by our wits, and by our skill with a gun, some of us. ”

“ Greaves turned to Adelie, who waited, poised, while old Vigil and the young man quarreled. "Tell me the situation," Greaves said.
Adelie's lips parted. But the old man interrupted.
"The situation is that you have been awakened needlessly and would best go back to sleep at once. My daughter and these fanatical sheep—" he waved an angry arm at the standing worshippers—"have forced me to permit this. But in fact Humanity neither needs you nor wants you awake."
"Oh, on the contrary," the young man said. "Humanity needs its gods very badly at this hour. But you are only a man, not so?" ”

“ What was Pat doing, tied up with Thorsten? She was a high grade operator now, as far from the immature tease I'd known at the Academy as I could imagine. Where had she learned to handle a gun like that? Where had she gotten the experience that let her handle a job this size by herself?
I couldn't answer that—not any of it, and it was driving me nuts. I stared over the control banks at the forward screen, watching the stars, and beating my brains out.
We'd been out in space for two days, and I hadn't dared to try and find out. You don't, when you're alone with the woman you love. ”

“ But you don't get down to earth over a communicator, and you don't realize the other fellow's got the same gripes you do while you're both flapping around up in the air. When you don't meet your neighbor face to face, and get friendly with him, and see that he's got your problems, you never realize that maybe things aren't the way Josef Kimmensen says they are. You never get together and decide that all of Josef Kimmensen's fine words don't amount to anything. ”

“ Kimmensen despaired of ever making the old-fashioned politician types like Salmaggi understand the new society. Kimmensen, too, could feel sorrow at the thought of homesteads razed, of people dead in the midst of what they had worked to build. It was hard—terribly hard—to think of; too easy to imagine each might be his own home. ”

“ Greaves said, "other dunderheads come to gain what in exchange for what?"
"Gain at least some sort of affirmation at the cost of remaining men!" the old man growled. "If they are simple, at least they are human! And even an intelligent man can see the value in what is embodied here." ”