Noel M. Loomis

“ For six weeks he had been in the swamp where he never had dared to take off his diving-suit even when he was resting on a clump of floating grass, for fear it would suddenly sink and drop him into a hundred feet of brown water; six weeks walking through mud sometimes over his head, with the brown, infested water above that; six weeks pitting all his swamp lore against sudden death in a thousand forms, with only the light gravity of Venus to aid him, and his indomitable determination to keep him going. But now he felt like a million.
No man had ever crossed the Great Swamp alone on foot before. ”

“ Hudson. "What," High-Pockets asked, "is your theory of this machine?"
Dr. Hudson smiled. "I am glad you asked that, Mr. Jones. Very glad. This process is in no sense a separation or thinning out of the man in the chair. It is, in reality; an unusual extension of the well-known fact that nature tends to follow a pattern. If you want to make a synthetic sapphire, you start with a seed sapphire, and the artificial process builds up on that. Now, this machine, which I call an extender, is merely a far-reaching extension of the synthesis of precious stones." ”

“ The strange ship seemed badly crippled; it was floundering in an apparently aimless spiral toward the planet called Inscription Rock. They followed it.
"What is Inscription Rock?" asked the junior officer of ordnance.
"Inscription Rock is the graveyard of military ambitions," Gorthy said gruffly. "It's an orphaned planet from some solar system that nobody can remember. It has wandered around in the Pass for a million years, and nobody has ever claimed it because it has nothing on it of value, and it's too vulnerable to be worth defending as a base. ”

“ One summer the Phoebus was making a trajectory shot over the Sun when Healey spoke to the Old Man about the Zytztzes.
"There is no doubt in my mind that they are human," he said. "A human being has to have a soul, doesn't it?"
The Old Man looked at him sharply. "That is not the same definition you offered a few years back."
Healey blushed. "No, sir. I was wrong, and I'm sorry. They have souls, all right. Any kind of creature that loves the ether as the Martians do—he simply has to have a soul." ”

“ Stieve looked around the booth. He recognized the big-boned Cro-Magnards on one side and he assumed the smaller, darker men on the other side were the Azilians.
A great reindeer-skinned caveman stepped to the microphone and, at a nod from Prem, the Cro-Magnard began to speak.
"Ladies, gentlemen. Pardon me, ladies do not have suffrage yet. Gentlemen. We here for great celebration, invention of the wheel. Man's most significant event. Without wheel future generations would not have can-openers, baby-buggies, or steam-rollers. Cro-Magnards very proud to have invented wheel." ”

“ Once a day you turn your slips into Central and the Machine audits your account. That's all there is to it."
"But there's nothing else to do," Mark objected. "No entertainment, no work."
"Why should there be entertainment? Entertainment means work for somebody. No, Central—which is the government, of course—has eliminated work for everybody and at the same time has provided something to keep everybody busy. What work must be done is done by automatic, self-lubricating, self-repairing, self-renewing machinery." She sighed. "It's a brave new world. Everything is neatly worked out. ”

“ Relegar squealed. His two eyes almost exploded in a rage of red. He wasn't permanently injured—he would grow a new leg—but he was furious because he dared not come close to the shield. The radiation would paralyze him within a couple of seconds. Grant saw his body sag a little on the corner where the leg had been, and then he had one of those flashes of intuition that every being had to have, to live long in the swamp. He knew how to win this fight. He trained the heat-gun on the second leg on the same side and pressed the trigger. That leg burned in two and Relegar's body sagged still more. ”