Fox B. Holden

“ Even one hundred and forty million miles from the Sun, the unfiltered daylight was harsh and the reflection of it from the crimson sand hurt his eyes. The vault of the blue-black sky was too high; the desert plain was too flat and too silent, and save for the thin Martian wind that whorled delicately-fluted traceries in the low dunes that were the only interruption in the flatness, there was no motion, and the planet was too still.
Johnny Love stopped his walking. Even in the lesser gravity, it seemed too great an effort to place one booted foot before the other. ”

“ Kriijorl's face was tilted upward, and in the faint glow of the planetesimal belt that girdled Thrayx, it seemed more than ever that of an heroic Viking king of ages gone.
"There's a chance he hasn't!" Mason breathed. He had the thought now, pinned down, clear in his head. "If there has been no alarm back at our own camp we may still have the mentacom to ourselves. We'll signal Ihelos as you planned and then—then there is something else you will say. Something else that I think will, as the saying goes on Earth, kill two birds with a single blast." ”

“ It was seldom in their past that their faith was placed wholeheartedly in it. But they're my people just as they're yours, Cragin, and I love them because they are. And that's why I'm on my way to take over the machine-planet; to destroy it. To destroy it so that it can never be replaced."
"You aren't making sense, gal."
"I am, Cragin. Because Owners or no Owners, the Earth—the entire system and the universe in which it lives—have true physical and chemical values of their own—values determined in the very beginning by an entity far higher than they!" ”

“ And Earth itself became a pale blue bull's eye, growing perceptibly larger with each minute in the viewscreen.
He did not unlock the top button. He could be already many, many hours too late, but there was no knowing.
Like a great torpedo, the ship hurtled toward its target as though to blast it from Space. In eight minutes it would be midway between Earth and its moon, and in nine, Doug would invert, cutting the difference between crash and controlled landing perilously thin.
"Terry, get the dead man's sword and belt. Mike, help me find some tools—anything that even looks like a wrench." ”

“ You knew, when the Vulture and a section of her fleet closed in to make the kill that nobody had the guts to try to stop you. Sure, Jeremy Cutlass had been a tough old duck—but even he wouldn't have been able to hold the fifty-ship buccaneer fleet together after the Patrol had gotten fully organized. Robbin remembered how it had been when he died—the whole fleet had hovered in double-echelon to each side of the Vulture, the faded sun-glow from Pluto glimmering shadow-like from its long, slender hulls—right at the very edge of the total darkness of Deep Space itself. ”

“ Swiftly, she slipped into an air lock, flattened herself against a narrow bulkhead as its inner port slid shut, and remained immobile as its automatic pumps cycled down to zero pressure. Now she would wait, watch and pray that no one looked into the lock in passing. It was a crazy gamble, and if Jon were not aboard....
She watched the star strewn blackness, narrowed her eyelids against the awful glare in it each time a battery fired, and there was a sudden little catch in her throat as the limn of mighty Jupiter swung majestically into her field of vision. ”

“ He saw the frown forming on Kriijorl's face.
"Thrayx, and the Forest of Saarl," he bit from between teeth clenched against the creeping agony in him. "The Book of the Saints, Kriijorl. It is the key, don't you see. Key to all this, your feud."
For an instant the Ihelian said nothing, but groped in hidden pockets of his battered space harness. His long fingers quickly produced a tablet, thrust it into Mason's hand. The Earthman swallowed it and almost at once energy coursed as though from some hidden well in his body through his flagging muscles and nerves. ”

“ Doug was saying. "I wonder what they—my God, Dot, look up—all over. Where is it?"
Far above, the sky seemed gradually to darken into an ever-deepening shadow of blackness. But the sun—She couldn't find the sun!
"It's a different planet, Doug!"
"And the city—it is lit! There must be a sun but it's down—it's night, and they've found a way to illuminate an entire city as though daylight were perpetual!" ”

“ And in the brief moment before he spoke, the history of it all flashed through Angelo's mind; the history that began with the Revolt. Three centuries ago, with the Ancestors of them all on Ste. Catherine. The artists, the philosophers, the writers, the orators, the dramatists, the poets—all of them, who had, when at last they could no longer stomach their civilization's arrested adolescence and its refusal to be weaned from its electronic and atomic toys, remembered the first Fundamental Law of Order in art, and put it to devastating use. ”

“ Without our science, Miss Griffin, we'd've all died five hundred years ago. Maybe that's why it takes top rating back home. What our men of science say we can do, we do—what they say we can't, we know we can't. It's that simple, only I don't see why I'm telling you this. For five centuries men have known from the day they could talk what their lives would be from that day to their deaths, and from one end of the universe their forbears had mastered to the other. It's all mapped out. It has to be, because the scientists tell us—they draw the maps. ”

“ Men sweated under the mild sun with a silent hurry, with a disciplined excitement.
Southard was fast and efficient.
Dobermann was silent, watching, analyzing.
Carruthers had the hungry look in his eyes that Joel did not understand.
And Joel was impatient. It was a tableau of men and machines that he had watched before, and always, at the end of it, there was something big for him to handle—frustrating if not dangerous, a mind and bone-wearying struggle if not an outright battle. They never came smooth, never. ”

“ And he did not see her as she scooped the jagged stone from the ground, thrust it into a tattered tool-pocket of her uniform.
Past the quiescent, sweat reeking bodies of the bull-muscled guards, into the dimly lit chamber beyond, Bruhlla half walking, half shambling before her.
She watched him as he switched the device into life; waited until its dull orange glow assured that it was ready for use. So much like the communications room of an ordinary ship of Earth, she thought. So like the familiar things of her life, yet so alien. ”

“ Too tired to look now for another time-track, to throw the Contraption wildly out of focus and careen through a thousand tracks, a million, and look for a place where a man and a woman could be simply that and nothing either more nor less. For in all infinity there was no such place, and the running would be worth less than the wasted breath it took.
With Dot, one last time, then.
She stirred. Her eyes opened, and she smiled.
"Doug? Did you finish it, Doug?"
"Yes. Yes, I finished it, as far as it ever will be finished."
She dropped her eyes. "We can keep trying." They met his. ”

“ Saturn pulsed palely in the void before them as though painted in three dimensions by a master artist. Kane pointed through the duraglass conning bubble at the spectacle. Ringed planets were rare, even in the wide fastnesses of Space which the ITA commanded with its far-flung fleet. And off to the huge, banded planet's lee swung the largest of its satellites, long since made livable by the now forgotten cleverness of the Solmen.
"Titan?" Deanne asked.
"It is," Jon said.
"May I ask you why you decided on it? There seem to be others. Full sized planets, even." ”

“ Leaving your warp to poke around in ordinary three-dimensional Space on jets was like leaving your surface-car parked on a speedway to hike up a side-road on foot. You had to get back to the speedway to get home. And if you broke a leg—
Krist was already outside, lugging tool-carriers to a spot Logan had selected to begin. Ronal turned to his wife.
"Well, we can't keep a weather-eye out for bug-eyed monsters in here," he said. "Might as well go brave the Great Unknown ourselves. ”

“ A screen generator whined its overload as the Patrol ships got the Vulture's range and pounded her with everything they had. This time, they were too many—and too fast.
"Run!" Cutlass howled to the drive-room. "Godammit, run!"
His eyes were hot and wet with the rage that rasped in his voice. No Cutlass that had ever buccaneered Space for four generations had ever given that command. But now the notorious Vulture, last of her kind in the Solar System, finally was forced to take to her jets or be torpedoed to cosmic dust like all the rest. ”