Jack Sharkey

“ It's like having a dream, Doctor. Things that would startle you in everyday life seem correct. Even familiar. But there's a kind of pattern to events. At first, I'm in my universe, and mostly in control. Then little fragments of my pseudo-reality start slipping, changing into other things. The changes seem perfectly normal to me. Then, all at once, the guy with the brass buttons turns up—and I've managed in the nick of time, twice, to realize that I was about to be sent or led between the disrupting plates of your atomic duplicator. ”

“ After all, under ordinary circumstances, no one in his right mind would try sneaking into an IS stronghold!
Baxter, as it turned out, was seated at a desk not unlike his own back on Earth, in the very office where I'd been last interrogated by the team of Charlie and Foster. He was staring into space, and smoking a cigar, the solitary incandescent lamp on his desk making his ice-white mane of hair a sort of angelic aurora about that pleasantly rubicund face. It was like seeing Satan sporting a good-conduct medal. ”

“ Amid the sparking cloud of fireflies, fluttering cornflakes, glinting spoons, and a foursome of hazy, still-processing new labs, there was a newcomer to the chaos. Something in one of the plunging artifacts must have rubbed something else the wrong way, made a spark, and—Well, the machine was complacently sucking in raw blazing energy, now, tongue upon tongue of orange flame and black, spiralling smoke that rose from the pyre of shattered synthetics. ”

“ Some common tacit urging made the men continue with their jobs there, go through the routine of scanning the universe, radioing reports to stations long since molten piles of slag, metering the water and precious oxygen that kept them alive. No one wanted to talk of what they'd seen; life went on for many hours as though nothing untoward had happened. Then, when the last strained thread of control was fraying madly—
The spaceship landed, with its five-person complement. ”

“ The outstretched arms swung down until the pallid palms came firmly together before the Speakster's chest, the cowled head bowed low, and then the figure on the dais descended from sight, the stiff "petals" re-closing over the spot on which the Speakster had stood, and the golden light vanishing as the Light-of-Day sprang bluely into harsh life against the crystal dome. Lloyd turned obediently, as soon as movement was possible in the dispersing crowd, and started toward his point of entrance, the arcade that would lead him into his sector of the Hive. ”

“ She had to fumble with a ring of keys before she found the one that opened the stiff metal padlock on the cellar door. "Haven't been down here in months," she said with a little laugh, flicking on the lightswitch, and preceding him down the stairs. He followed wordlessly past the heaped cartons of odd bits of junk, past the furnace—unused during the summer months—and to a small room (really hardly more than a bin) at the rear of the cellar.
Mrs. Tibbets reddened in embarrassment as she opened the crooked door of plain, unsanded boards. ”

“ On the other hand, Snow had the most devastating blue eyes. I shifted in my position and felt cold metal bump lightly against my chest beneath my blouse. I'd forgotten about the Amnesty. Hell! I was the most influential, powerful person in the universe, wasn't I? If I wanted to plaster the secret across the face of the moon, no one had the authority to say no. Not even Baxter, however purple he might turn at the idea, could tell me not to do anything! ”

“ We don't have to come out and look for food in the rubble. We can live indefinitely on Moonbase. Please, darling! Please?"
"I've got to think," said Pete, blinking. "It never occurred to me I'd have a third choice. I was resigned to sitting and waiting for the blast. Now—I'm all mixed up."
"It's life Martin's offering us!" pleaded Beth. "You can't turn down an offer of life, real survival!"
"But—But is it?!" asked Pete, uncertainly. "We can't leave Moonbase any more than we could leave Corey's shelter. What difference if we're buried alive to avoid radiation or freezing vacuum?" ”

“ Why is the Hive? Andra stood and watched, anxiously, as he depressed the starter-button beside the keyboard again. Again the lights and the eerie whistlings of the Brain arose in maddening crescendo all about her, while Lloyd twitched and shuddered, his eyes clamped rigidly closed, in the chair. ”

“ When the men landed upon the moon in the twentieth century, they did not find it at first. Locating it would have been comparable to stumbling upon a solitary blade of grass, imbedded in ice at the South Pole. Men came to the moon, though, and began to settle there. The first homes they knew were mere metal shacks, filled with life-giving gases of their planetary atmosphere, and devoid of all comforts save those necessary for maintenance of life. ”

“ Vandor set the box against the cellar wall and turned to her, his face white and angry. "Madam, that is my own personal business, if you don't mind!"
Mrs. Tibbets shrugged. "Well, I just saw a dribble of dirt coming out of it, and thought perhaps I could sweep it out for you—"
Vandor's face went—if anything—whiter. "No!" he roared, in an almost terrified voice. "I—I mean, that won't be necessary. It's supposed to be full of earth. I—I'm a sort of—of botanist. I grow things."
"Hmmph," Mrs. Tibbets sniffed. "You won't be able to grow anything but mushrooms, down here!" ”

“ The light came from the trylon tip of Clatclit's tail. It reflected in a red glow from the cavern floor, but vanished over our heads into an impenetrable darkness. Beyond Snow, I saw the Space Scouts getting to their feet. The kids were in much better shape than I was. With consistent bad luck, I'd taken the fall on my injured left arm, and now it was throbbing like crazy. Ted came rushing over to us.
Then I remembered Baxter and looked swiftly about. He was nowhere to be seen. "Clatclit!" I shouted.
My crystalline buddy came hurrying over to me, his little taillight bobbing as he ran. ”

“ From any or all of a Goon's six fingertips could spring the dreaded Snapper Beam, an electronic refinement of vibrations that struck the human nervous system almost identically with the chemical effect of strychnine poisoning, except that a Snapper Beam worked instantly, and always fatally. A brush of the invisible force, and a man's face creased into the frenzied grin of a madman, his legs danced wildly, uncontrollably, and the muscles of his back contracted tightly, relentlessly, remorselessly, until his spine cracked in two. ”

“ When oranges began rolling off the ground in the California and Florida groves, and huddling in a mound here and there upon the countryside, the Spirit of Worry injected itself into the public consciousness. Niagara Falls' spectacular skew-wise splashing toward the Canadian side didn't set many hearts at ease, either.
And then someone remembered the moonplants, and saw that each new apparent gravity-tug was coming from the stump of one of the plants, and a leading scientist figured out the answer, after getting a snipped-off segment of moonplant root and testing the hell out of it. ”

“ I saw the little curls of sheared-off wax falling down the face of the wall to the floor of the tunnel.
I handed the lipstick back to a bewildered Snow.
"Just as I thought," I said. "That, honey, is the rock known as parabolite. The toughest, most impervious substance in the solar system. Nothing marks it, scratches it, or even budges it. We couldn't get past here with an intercontinental size collapser!"
"But Jery, look!" Snow cried, pointing at the wall. I looked. The flat wall of parabolite, the impervious mineral, was going slowly concave in the center. ”

“ The man who found it was an engineer, a man of high intelligence. For, building on the moon was a perilous undertaking. A man had to know stresses and strains, had to be able to read gauges that warned of vacuum pockets beneath the crust of the moon that—if broken into—could suck the life-giving gases from the metal caissons within which the men laid the foundations of new Domes. Had it been on Earth, and the workman unionized and possibly unlettered, it would have had the fate of a dandelion that stands in the path of a growing subway tube. ”