Irving E. Cox

“ The tribes which migrated across the sea have taken a part of my name as their sun god; they call me Amon. Here at home they call me Zeus. Dayhan has become Diana, the goddess of the forests. Even Baiel leaves his name with a people settled in the desert, though to us Baal persists as a god of evil things.
Ironically, the one thing of Earth that I have given these people is the name itself. This planet they call the Earth, unaware of any other. They think of themselves as Earthmen. And I? I am called Zeus of Olympus, father of all the gods! ”

“ He had the instrument that would do it, the hundreds of obedient slaves Young had already turned loose on the streets. With Ann's transmitter he could transform the disciplined strike of human automatons into a civic disaster. Terror and violence uprooting the foundations of the city.
But a moment's madness could not overthrow the enduring rationality of Hunter's adjustment index. To loose that horror was to set himself in judgment upon the dreams and hopes, the perversion and the sublimity, of his fellow men. To play at God—a delusion no different from Eric Young's. ”

“ He saw the male holding the female in his arms and mopping blood from the gash Henig had torn in her cheek.
These inexplicable aliens and their affection for each other! It defied all logic and reason. Their behavior was absurd; yet somehow sublime, too. From the arid emptiness of his logical mind, Henig, for a moment, had a vision of something great: a new world which fused the intellect of the computer civilization and the warmth of this animal emotion. These ugly, white-faced animals had a resource far more valuable than petroleum to export to the empire. ”

“ On the space-field, in neat ranks, the Vininese space-fleet was drawn up in proud review. The planet had fallen! Dirrul made his decision instinctively.
The Space-dragon wheeled and swept low over the field, its vicious guns blazing. The yellow clouds of destruction swept up toward the sky—the little ship was caught in the blazing flame. The interplanetary freight sheds loomed ahead. And the world exploded, falling apart into a soothing painless silence.
Dirrul opened his eyes and looked at the neutral blue of a hospital ceiling. Gradually he became conscious of Dr. Kramer, seated by the bed. ”

“ But what does it matter, Tchassen thought bitterly, if our intentions were noble and unselfish? It's what Earth thinks we meant to do that counts. And by that standard we've failed. We have no right to be here.
Alone in the cold darkness of the abandoned restaurant, Tchassen faced the fear gnawing at his soul. The drug he had taken warped his depression into a crushing weight of melancholy. The occupation of the Earth had gone wrong—or so it seemed to him—because the council of scientists misjudged the native mentality. ”

“ No man was enslaved by the compound, for the compound did not exist. He was imprisoned by his own sense of guilt, his own fear of being different. George remembered his own fear and guilt: he knew how much a man could be driven to make himself conform to what he thought other men were like.
His revenge was as foolish as the sham he wanted to destroy. He should have reasoned that out long ago; he should have realized it was impossible to have immunity to an addictive drug. But, no, George believed what he saw on the television programs. He was victimized as much as any man had ever been. ”

“ The hope of yesterday and the disillusionment of now; his pride as a pioneer; and the pain of his responsibility for what his frontier had created. Out of the chaos a pattern of action slowly emerged. Sometime in the small hours before the dawn Greg made up his mind what he would do.
It would be futile to try to arouse the colonies to attack the earth. Each man in his own soul might admit the truth, but as a culture they would all reject it. They needed to keep the symbol of earth as home, though they might never return to it. ”

“ In the treaty areas, where men could put their naked feet upon the soil and feel the life-energy of the earth, where men breathed the fresh wind and held sovereignty over their environment—only there were men really free. Would he trade that for the city walls that blotted out the sun, and the monotonous throbbing of machines? The victor was the slave; the conquered had found the road to liberty. For the first time in his life Lanny understood the paradox. Stated in those terms, what did men actually have to fight for?
As he always did when he had a problem, Lanny went to Juan Pendillo. ”

“ Bertha began to see Walt as he was: brilliant, no doubt, in the single area of physical science, but basically no different from any other man. She desperately wished that she could love him; she earnestly wished that the ideal, fixed so long in her mind, might be destroyed.
But slowly she saw the miracle slip away from her. That night, after the fire-fall, Walt did not ask her to go with him to the lecture. Miserable and angry, Bertha Kent went into her tent, but not to sleep. ”

“ Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up—laboratories, sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and Ann Howard’s schoolroom.
Beyond the clearing was the edge of the magnificent forest which covered so much of this planet. Far away, in the foothills of a distant mountain range, Lord saw the houses of a village, gleaming in the scarlet blaze of the setting sun. A world at peace, uncrowded, unscarred by the feverish excavation and building of man. ”

“ By eight o'clock the stirrings in the jungle had stopped. The men began to relax. Waitresses from the Bid-a-Wee Cafe brought out doughnuts and coffee and distributed them among the crowd.
There came, then, a new disturbance at the far end of Main Street, a shouting of tumultuous voices. A mob moved slowly into the center of town, clinging to the sides of an antiquated dump truck.
"Gold! Gold! Gold!" It was like a chant shouted with ecstatic antiphony. The dump truck stopped and Elvin saw the unbelievable—gleaming heaps of gold shoveled like gravel into the back of the vehicle. ”

“ Don't trap yourself in another self-delusion, Edward. All that's happened is that you've grown up."
Dirrul said slowly, feeling for words that would express the idea as he felt it, "When I was in the center of the galaxy, looking out on space, I almost grasped a new concept but I lost it when the Agronian patrol attacked me. It's coming back.
"Time and space seem to be one and the same. Neither exists as an objective reality. There is no past and no future—all of it occurs eternally in the instant of my own being. I am everything and nothing—infinity and a speck lost in space." ”

“ But his mockery was slowly tainted with fear, as the sun mounted the heavens and my armed men still held the tribe in the village.
The stretcher bearers arrived with Dayhan. She was awake. She sat up against my shoulder, holding tight to my hand. Softly she spoke to the tribe as I had:
"It is not the gods that rule us. There are no taboos; the glacier is but a thing of ice, without life. I have seen for myself. I have walked unharmed on the tabooed ground. In truth, we must migrate to the south, but my Lord has taught us that we must go of our own will and not because of fear of the sun god." ”

“ Just before unconsciousness came, he saw a band of natives on the edge of the clearing.
The swaying motion of the stretcher shook him awake. The Earthmen were carrying him along a narrow mountain trail, past deep drifts of snow. His wound, where Briggan's beam had hit him, was neatly bandaged; he could smell the odor of a disinfectant. It surprised him that the Earth people knew so much about medicine; but it surprised him more that they had tried to save his life. ”

“ Desert sand had drifted across the streets. The highpoled intersection lights, still burning, cast a blue halo in the empty, dirty windows.
Greg's shoulders sagged as he walked toward the central square of Port City. He had to see the monument again. He had to drain the last bitterness from his homecoming. In the Martian colony they had told him it would be like this. He hadn't believed them. How could a legend be forgotten in a generation?
From a block away he saw the metal statue, turned a sickly blue by the corner street light. ”

“ Like marching puppets, the mob moved toward the police. Clearly Hunter could hear a shrill voice ordering them to halt.
Hunter felt a sickening inner horror. How could the mob obey when they heard nothing but the enslaving grid, and responded to neither fear nor reason? Still they moved forward, in a robot death march. Whatever happened, it was a situation Young could turn to his advantage. If the mercenaries killed unarmed workers, it could be turned into superb propaganda. And ultimately, by sheer weight of numbers, the defenseless mob could overwhelm the mercenaries. ”

“ All of us want more than anything else to be like other people. Women have created a world for you with television programs; you grow up observing nothing else; you make yourself fit into the pattern. Only a few independent-minded characters have the courage to accept their own immunity; most of them end up here, trying to do something noble for the rest of mankind. But you have one satisfaction, for what it's worth: you've been true to yourself."
True to yourself. George found a strange comfort in the words, and his fear was gone. ”

“ I rode the god-car up from Rythar—I am coming now to spread the Sickness on Earth—because I wanted to know the truth about something that puzzled me. I had to know what was above the rain mist. In the answer house you would not tell us that. Now I understand why. We were children. You were waiting for us to mature. And that is the mistake you made; that blindness nearly destroyed your civilization.
“You will have to build another Guardian Wheel. This time don’t hide anything from us because we’re children. The truth makes us mature, not illusions or taboos. ”

“ Thirty adolescents, suddenly possessing more knowledge than the world had ever known, had run riot, playing with hypnotism, the transmutation of matter, the Law of Degravitation, the fourth dimensional transposition of whole city blocks. Within two days their energetic curiosity, their adolescent love of excitement and experiment, had thrown the world into crisis. By this time, Elvin concluded, they would be terrified by a feeling of immense guilt, ready to be told what to do to make amends. ”

“ To migrate had always been one of my goals for the tribe.
But, when I proposed migration, I came face to face with the strongest of their taboos. The volcanic mountains to the south were more terrifying than brother glacier, which moved inexorably closer with the passing years. No argument, no logic, no patient persuasion could weaken the force of the taboo. Even Dayhan, who had learned so much, refused to listen to me. Beyond the fire mountains lay the hunting ground of the dead; it was forever forbidden to the living. ”

“ But he knew it was more important for him to contact Vininese Headquarters first. He had a message to deliver. Glenna herself would have wanted that.
In two hours Dirrul was on the plain again. All the suffering of the past few hours was gone. The plentiful purple grass had quenched his thirst and surprisingly eased his hunger as well. He felt keenly alert and alive. The sun was warm, the air was balmy. He was on Vinin.
Spiritually he had come home, to the thing he believed in. Not many men had such opportunity to realize their dreams of perfection. ”

“ True, these people had created a brilliant technology, but it didn't follow that they would comprehend the social forces at work in the civilized galaxy. Their emotional reactions were at best on an adolescent level; intelligence alone would not lift them up to maturity. The prisoners in the compounds learned nothing but hatred; they lived for nothing but revenge. Vividly Tchassen saw the nightmare of the future: the time when the savages on the Earth had weapons to match the dispersal ray; the time when they would be able to build ships that could invade the civilized galaxy. ”