Damon Knight

“ The force of the wind was dropping rapidly; so was the air pressure. Ragged black blotches swam before Weaver's eyes. He fumbled with his helmet, trying to swing it back over his head; but it stubbornly remained where it was. The blow when he struck the airlock wall, he thought dimly—it must have bent the helmet so that it would not fit into its grooves.
He forced himself across the room, toward the faint gleam of the Aurigean control board—shaped like a double horseshoe it was, around the two lattice-topped stools, and bristling with levers, knobs and sliding panels. ”

“ We took all that was best in thousands of years of yearning and striving for the right, he thought, and we made it into the Inquisition and the Star Chamber and the NKVD. We fattened our own children for each generation's slaughter. And yet we are not all evil. Astereos is right: if the other races had been like ourselves, it would have been bearable; or if we ourselves had been creatures of pure darkness, conscienceless, glorying in cruelty—then we could have made war on the Galaxy joyfully, and if we failed at least there would have been an element of grandeur in our failure. ”

“ A flying thing moved lazily across the clear, cumulus-dotted sky, perhaps half a mile away. Maxwell trained his binoculars on it: it was an absurd lozenge with six pairs of wings—an insect, perhaps; he couldn't tell. He heard a raucous cry down below, not far away, and glanced down hoping to see one of the carnivores; but the rippling sea of foliage was unbroken.
He watched Alice breathing deeply. Maxwell grinned. Her face was shiny with perspiration and pleasure. "Where to now?" he asked.
The girl peered to the right, where a glint of silver shone on the horizon. ”

“ It is a truism that a human being can get used to very nearly everything. The hardy Eskimo, lying belly-down on a plain of ice that stretched unbroken to the sky, probably spent little of his time in meditating upon the vastness and inscrutability of the Universe ... he was thinking of his dinner. And Charles Samson, seven hundred years later, looked past his long nose at a scene of equal majesty—our galaxy, viewed from a ship in mid-arc—in a similar frame of mind. ”

“ A moment later the same thing happened to a tall brown-haired girl over to my left.
That was too much. Glancing up, I happened to see the big cut-glass chandelier begin swaying gently from side to side, jingling faintly, working up momentum. I moved faster, buttonholing everyone I knew: "Have you seen Ray? Have you seen Ray?"
I heard my name, and there he was, standing like stout Cortez atop the piano, where he could see the whole room like an anthill. I climbed up beside him. Alvarez, to quote Duchamp's description, is a small rumpled man with an air of sleepy good-nature. ”

“ Len took a deep breath. "Let's not get off on that. What I want to know is, what is it like? Do you seem to hear a real voice, or do you just know what he's telling you, without knowing how you know?"
Moira put the comb down in order to think better. "It isn't like hearing a voice. You'd never confuse one with the other. It's more—the nearest I can come to it, it's like remembering a voice. Except that you don't know what's coming."
Len picked his tie off the floor and abstractedly began knotting it on his bare chest. ”

“ But Rack stood as if he had forgotten time and space, staring bemused over Monk's shoulder at De Grasse. The fourth man, Spider—bones and gristle, with a corpse-growth of grey-white hair—stood up slowly. Rack put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down again.
Cudyk thought: Kathy Burgess.
It was the only answer. De Grasse knew, of course, everything that had passed between Harkway and the girl. There was no privacy worth mentioning in the Quarter. Pressed in this narrow ghetto, every man swam in the effluvium of every other man's emotions. ”

“ The people were there, yes but they were flowing away in a swiftly-widening circle. They disappeared into buildings, and the ways snatched them up, and in a heartbeat they were gone.
There were left only two blood-red, malignant monstrosities somehow defiling the air they floated in; and below them, a pitiful huddle of flesh no longer recognizable as human beings. They were not dead, those men and women, but they wanted to be. Their bodies had been impossibly joined, fused together into a single obscene, floundering mass of helpless protoplasm. ”

“ We would become Kassids—meaning that the Word would come before everything else—meaning in turn that we'd stop being the masterful mayflies who boss this half of the galaxy. We might not even stay where we are. In fact, there would be a lot of changes, some big, some small, but they would all add up to this: the human race as we know it would cease to exist ... and we can't have that, can we? The universe may belong to the angels, but we're men. You can believe that I'm not telling you this just to put your mind at rest about Jackson. ”

“ For the Invaders have spared no part of this planet in their depredations: they have laid Hong Kong waste; they have terrorized London; they have destroyed the lives of citizens in every member state and in every inhabited area. There can be few within reach of printed reports or my words who have not seen the Invaders, or whose friends have not seen them.
"The peoples of the world, then, know what they are, and know that we face the most momentous struggle in our history. We face an enemy superior to ourselves in every way. ”

“ Len announced.
"So am I, but—"
"Look," said Len, moving energetically to the arm of her chair. "We've always had it pretty good, haven't we? Not that it hasn't been tough at times, but—you know."
"I know."
"Well, that's the way it'll be again, once this is over. I don't care how much of a superbrain he is, once he's born—you know what I mean? The only reason he's had the edge on us all this time is he could get at us and we couldn't get at him. If he's got the mind of an adult, he can learn to act like one. It's that simple."
Moira hesitated. "You can't take him out to the woodshed. ”

“ The pantograph was tracing Weaver's eyelids, and then the unfeeling eyes themselves.
"But all things must end," said Luke. "Now we have these others, who do not like what you have done, so we cannot worship you any more. And anyway, some of the people are growing tired. It has been ten years. A long time."
One thought pierced through the swirling fear in Weaver's mind. The guns, built with so much labor, the enormous guns that could throw a shell two hundred miles. The crews, manning them night and day to destroy the first ship that came in from space. ”

“ Dimly, he saw the universe the Beachcomber spoke of: a universe of Men set free. Over that inconceivable gap of time that stretched between Maxwell's time and theirs, they had purged themselves of all their frailties. Maxwell saw them striding among the stars, as much at home in the pitiless void as on the verdant planets they loved. He saw them tall and faultless and strong, handsome men and beautiful women, all with the power that glowed in the Beachcomber, but without a hint of his sadness. ”

“ Every science fiction reader in the world, I suppose, had the same thought—of a wanderer's footprints fresh in the ancient dust, his handprints on controls not shaped for hands, the old wild light wakened. ”

“ One question of Harkway's kept coming back to Cudyk. "Would you live in a universe drenched with blood?"
Rack would, of course; for others there was a tragic dilemma. For them, the race had come to the end of a road that had its beginning in prehistory. Every step of progress on that way had been accomplished by bloodshed, and yet the goal had always been a world at peace. It had been possible to live with the paradox when the road still seemed endless: before the first Earth starships discovered that humanity was not alone in the universe. ”

“ Midge seemed to be trying to look indignant, pleased in spite of herself.
"Harlow, Midge," said Samson slowly after a time, "there's one other thing about life in this universe that's been puzzling us for the last six centuries. We know now that it has nothing to do with the intelligence level, but we still don't know why everybody else but us reproduces by simple division, budding, spores or conjugation—and in consequence, lives a damn sight longer than we do, almost long enough to make up for their low native intelligence. ”

“ Out of those millions of possible mutations, there's one that will save the human race. We can't fight them, but a superman could. That's our only chance. Lorelei—darling—don't you see that?"
She choked, "But why can't you take me along?"
He stared unseeingly past her wet, upturned face. "You know why," he said bitterly. "Those rays are strong. They don't only work on embryos; they change adult life forms, too. I have one chance in seven of staying alive. You'd have one chance in a million of staying beautiful. I couldn't stand that. I'd kill myself, and then humanity would die, too. ”

“ Human beings were like a fragile crystalline structure, enduring until the first touch of air; or like a cyst that withers when it is cut open. The winds of the universe blew around them now, and there was no way to escape from their own nature.
The way forward was the way back; the way back was the way forward.
There was no peace except the peace of surrender and death. There was no victory except the victory of chaos.
As the priest had remarked, there were many theories about the Collapse. It was said that the economy of Earth had been wrecked by interstellar imports ”

“ Len brooded. "It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or Philomenes, though that doesn't seem possible. Look, damn it, if Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out Philomenes once and for all. Unless—no. I forgot about that business in the temple. Umm. Do you think Leo really knows what he's doing?"
"I'm certain. Lately I've been able to tell what he's thinking even when he isn't talking to me. I mean just generally, like when he's puzzling over something, or when he's feeling mean. ”

“ Maxwell frowned. "Don't be a cretin. These particular beaches have nothing to do with it; he just happens to be on one at the moment. He's a beachcomber because he lives like a bum—doesn't do any work, doesn't see people, just loafs and waits to be old enough to die."
"That's awful," said Alice. "It's—such a waste."
"In more ways than one," Maxwell added drily. "But what do you want? There's only one place he could be happy—three million years from now—and he can't go back. He says there isn't any place to go back to. ”

“ Finally he seized the note-pad and wrote, "Do not understand monstrous, please forgive. They do for more change, so not to make each other have tiredness."
Weaver frowned and wrote, "Does not your religion forbid this?"
Mark consulted in his own piping tongue with the other two. Finally he surrendered the note-pad to Luke, who wrote: "Do not understand religion to forbid, please excuse. With us many religion, some say spirits in flower, some say in wind and sun, some say in ground. Not say to do this, not to do that. With us all people the same, no one tell other what to do." ”

“ Ray and I looked at each other with a wild surmise. "Tom lives in Queens!" he said.
I scrambled down off the piano and the platform, but Ray was quicker. He darted into the crowd, using his elbows in short, efficient jabs. By the time I got to the door he was nowhere in sight.
The lobby was full of large powdery women in flowered dresses, one of them still shrieking. They slowed me down, and so did tripping over one of those big cylindrical jardinieres full of sand and snipes. I reached the street just in time to see Ray closing the door of a cab. ”

“ His short leather jacket was thrown over his shoulders like a cloak. His narrow features were grey and cold, the mouth a straight, hard line. He said, "That's what you want us to tell the vermin, isn't it, Mr. Harkway?"
Harkway seemed to settle himself like a boxer. He said clearly, "The intelligent races of the galaxy are not devils and do not want our souls, Mr. Rack." ”

“ Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. ”

“ Mark, Luke and John discussed this with every evidence of excitement. At last Mark wrote, "This very new idea to us."
"But do you have in this world no large, dangerous animals which must be killed? How do you kill those things which you eat?"
"No dangerous animals. We kill food things, but not use machines. Give some things food which make them die. Give some no food, so they die. Kill some with heat. Some eat alive."
Weaver winced with distaste when he read this last, and was about to write, "This must stop." ”

“ After them came dogs: one indistinguishable wave of liquid leaping torsos, flying ears, gullets. In half a second the room was an incident written by Dante for the Mutascope.
I caught a glimpse of a terrier bounding after two cats who were climbing Samwitz' back; I saw Duchamp asprawl, pipe still in his mouth, partially submerged under a tidal eddy of black and white. I saw Tom Q. rise up like a lighthouse, only to be bowled over by a frantically scrambling Leigh MacKean.
Ray touched my arm and pointed. Over by the far wall, his back against it, Gamble stood like a slightly potbound Viking. ”

“ How did women do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a year?
It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath.
The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered housecoat, was lighting a cigarette. ”

“ Her expression, Maxwell thought, said that there were better uses to which he could put himself.
Maxwell snorted. "Did you ever read—" He corrected himself; Alice obviously never read. "Did you ever see one of the old films about the South Seas? Ever hear of civilized men 'going native' or becoming beachcombers?"
Alice said, "Yes," a trifle uncertainly.
"All right, imagine a man stranded in a universe full of savages—pleasant harmless savages, maybe, but people who are three million years away from his culture. What's he going to do?" ”

“ They have examined us, dissected us, driven us mad, killed us with no discernable provocation; and this is more intolerable than any normal invasion.
"I have no fear that the people of Earth will fail to meet this challenge, for there is no alternative. Not only our individual lives are threatened, but our existence as a race. We must, and will, destroy the Invaders!"
Peter sank back in his chair, the full shock of it striking him for the first time.
"Will we?" he asked himself softly.
It was only two stories down the moving ramp to Lorelei Cooper's laboratory. ”

“ They are horrified at the way we live, and they are going to change it all around."
Weaver's fingers jerked uncontrollably, and the words wavered across the page. "I don't understand. I don't understand."
"I hope You are not angry. Master," said Luke. "We are very grateful to You. When You came, we were desperately bored. There had been no new thing for more than seven thousand years, since the last ship came from space. You know that we have not much imagination. We tried to invent new things for ourselves, but we could never think of anything so amusing as the ones You gave us. ”

“ Harkway said, "We all know that the Earth's technical civilization is smashed—broken like an eggshell. By ourselves, we could never put it back together. And if we do nothing, no one else is going to put it back together for us. But suppose we went to the other races in the galaxy, and said—"
A baritone voice broke in quietly, "'We'll sell our souls to you, if you'll kindly give us a few machines!'"
Rack stood up—tall, muscular, lean, with deep hollows under his cheekbones, red-grey hair falling over his forehead under the visor of his cap. ”

“ Maxwell wondered. Morals of one society didn't apply to another, he knew. Still—was it possible that the Beachcomber's people, Maxwell's own descendants, still had a taint of the old Adam? And was it accident that they were the only dominant life-form in the entire universe, or had they eliminated all other contenders? ”

“ Here he found a crowd of Terranovans of both sexes and all ages at a feast of something with a fearful stench. He asked what it was; Mark's answer had better not be revealed. Feeling genuinely sick with revulsion, Weaver demanded, "Why do they do such an awful thing? This is ten times worse than the other."
This time Mark answered without hesitation. "They do this like the other, for more change. Is not easy to learn to like, but they do, so not to make themselves have tiredness." ”

“ Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. ”

“ Ferguson said. "After they get through building the settlement, they can do what they want as long as they don't make any trouble. There'll be enough women to go around—they can settle down and raise kids. There won't be any liquor, and I'm going to keep the weapons locked up. About the ship—I'll wreck that as soon as we land. Once we're there, we're there."
If it were not for Ferguson himself, Cudyk thought, I believe I might do it. But Ferguson, inside a year, is going to be a pitiable and terrible object. This is his own punishment, his lesser evil—he chooses it himself. ”

“ I was just telling Vernon, before we saw you down here, that I wished I could go into the jungle without the scooter, to see all the wild animals and things. Will you take me in for a little walk, Dai? Vernon can mind the scooters—you wouldn't mind, would you, Vernie?"
Maxwell started to reply, but the Beachcomber forestalled him. "I assure you, Miss Zwerling," he said slowly, "that it would be a waste of your time and mine."
Alice blushed again, this time not so prettily. "Just what do you mean?" she demanded.
Dai looked at her gravely. "I'm not quite such a wild man as I seem," he said. ”

“ Luke hesitated. "Few, Master. At first all must be done by hand methods. Later it will be possible to make many at a time—fifty, or even a hundred in one month—but for the first two or three months, Master, two weapons in a month is all that Your unworthy servants can do."
"Very well," said Weaver. "See to it."
He turned and examined the large globe of the planet which stood on His desk. Here was another product of His genius; the Terranovans had scarcely had maps worthy of the name before His Coming. ”

“ Another fanatic, Cudyk thought. A liberal fanatic. I have seen all kinds, now. He said, "I have one more argument to try. Has Seu explained to you how precarious our position is here on Palumbar?"
"He spoke of it."
"The Niori accepted this one small colony with grave misgivings. Every act of violence that occurs here weakens our position, because it furnishes ammunition for a group which already wants to expel us. Do you understand?"
There was pain in Harkway's eyes. "Mr. Cudyk, it's the same all over the galaxy, wherever these pitifully tiny outgroups exist. ”

“ At the first one, he had been probed, examined and twittered over interminably; then the aircar had arrived, they had strapped him into this ridiculous seat and begun what looked very much like a triumphal tour. Other aircars, without the revolving arm, preceded and followed him. The slowly floating cars and their riders were gay with varicolored streamers. Every now and then one of the bug things in the cars would raise a pistol-like object to fire a pinkish streak that spread out, high in the air, and became a gently descending, diffusing cloud of rosy dust. ”

“ And I got a planet picked out where nobody will bother me—not Rack, and not the Galactics."
He took a cigar box from the desk and offered it to Cudyk. Cudyk shook his head, showing his pipe.
Ferguson took a cigar, twirled it in his lips slowly, and lit it. "You know," he said, bending forward, "there's plenty of planets in the galaxy that aren't inhabited. Some have never even been explored. They're off the shipping routes, no intelligent race on them, nothing special in the way of organic products, so nobody wants them. Rack's got one—I've got another." ”

“ He noticed Maxwell's wry smile. "Not like the planet-busters; there is a defense against those, you just haven't found it yet. But there actually was no defense whatever against their weapon. They were going to destroy our universe, down to the last quantum—wipe it right out of the series, make a blank where it had been."
"And—?" said Maxwell. He was beginning to understand why the Beachcomber had never told this story to anyone else; why the public at large must never know it. There was a feeling of doom in it that would color everything men did. ”

“ One star grew from a brilliant pinpoint to a tiny disk, and each time he awoke it was larger.
Weaver took counsel with himself, and pasted a small piece of transparent red tape over the place on the telescreen where the star appeared. He scratched a mark to show where the star was on each of three succeeding "days." The trail crawled diagonally down toward the bottom of the screen.
He knew nothing about astrogation; but he knew that if he were heading directly toward the star, it ought to stay in the same place on his screen. He turned on the engines and swung the steering arm downward. ”

“ The solid meters of lead in its outer skin, the shielding to keep out cosmic rays, were gone.
A man had just finished engraving the final stroke on its nameplate, to the left of the airlock—The Avenger. He stepped away now, and joined the group a little distance away, silently waiting.
Lorelei said, "You can't do it. I won't let you! Peter—"
"Darling," he began wearily.
"Don't throw your life away! Give us time—there must be another way."
"There's no other way," Peter said. He gripped her arms tightly, as if he could compel her to understand by the sheer pressure of his fingers. ”

“ The problems which had caused the tension no longer existed.
Earth was two months away. Cudyk expected nothing and hoped for nothing. But the Niori had agreed to set each passenger down wherever on the globe he chose to go; each man, at least, could choose his own hell. The crews of the captured battleships, and the captured staff of the base on New Earth, were also being sent back. The weapon that had been used on them had done no permanent damage; they would simply have to be retrained, to learn all over again, as if they were reborn. ”

“ The top of one extended arm was done. The aircar moved over and began the other, leaving the head still buried in stone.
After this, Weaver thought, He could rest. His cities were built, His church founded, His guns built and tested, His people trained. The Terranovans were as civilized as He could make them in one generation. They had literary societies, newsstands, stock markets, leisure and working classes, baseball leagues, armies.... They had had to give up their barbaric comfort, of course; so much the better. Life was real, life was earnest—Weaver had taught them that. ”

“ Harkway?"
"Certainly," said Harkway. "Assurances that no sane man would refuse them. Assurances, for example, that there would be no repetition of the Altair Incident—when a handful of maniacs in two ships murdered thousands of peaceful galactic citizens without the slightest provocation. Perhaps you remember that, Mr. Rack; perhaps you were there."
"I was there," said Rack casually. "About five hundred thousand vermin were squashed. We would have done a better job, but we ran out of supplies. Some day we'll exterminate them all, and then there'll be a universe fit for men to live in. ”

“ It was true that hundreds of millions of people lived on Earth much as they had done before, tilling their fields, digging stones from the ground, laboring over the handicrafts which sustained the men of the Quarter in their exile. ”