Roger D. Aycock

“ Charlie separated a menu-sized shrimp from his bucket.
“You grounded her,” he said sourly. “Push her off yourself.”
“Listen,” Ellis said desperately. “That blast was a ship from space, from another star. A wild animal escaped from it, something worse than you ever dreamed of. We’ve got to get out of here before it finds us.”
Charlie grunted and chose another shrimp.
The Morid, as Xaxtol had pictured it, rose vividly in Ellis’ memory, fanged and shaggy and insatiably voracious, a magenta-furred ursine embodiment of blood-lust made the worst by its near-human intelligence. ”

“ I can't begin to explain the principle behind the harmony existing between all living things on Balak; it just was, and seemed to operate like a sort of hyper-sympathy or interlocking telepathy between species. Every creature on the planet performed some service for some other creature—even the plants, which grew edibles without pain-nerves so it wouldn't hurt to be plucked, and which sent up clouds of dust-dry spores once a week to make it rain.
And the three-legged, eight-armed natives were right at the top of this screwy utopia, lords of it all. ”

“ The sound of Heric's laughter echoed emptily through the vast room.
"Stay my hand and let you adjust me into submission again? Let you send me back to planting wheat, drowning my identity in ignorance? I know the human race is almost dead—I know that you hide the truth from the few of us who remain because you think us doomed to extinction. You would bury us in ignorance and rule in our stead as if you were men and we your servants." ”

“ He tugged at the owlish tufts of hair over his ears, wrinkling his bald brow up at the enigmatic maze.
"We'll never feel safe again until the Bees are wiped out. I wonder if they know that. They never understood us, you know, just as we never understood them—they always seemed more interested in experimenting with slave ecology than in conquest for itself, and they never killed off their captive cultures when they pulled out for home. I wonder if their system of logic can postulate the idea of a society like ours, which must rule or die." ”

“ The scouter settled on the outcrop beside Farrell, so close that the hot wash of its exhaust gases scorched his bare legs. Gibson put out thick brown arms and hauled him inside like a straw man, ignoring the native. The scouter darted for shore with Farrell lying across Gibson's knees in the cockpit, his head hanging half overside.
Farrell had a last dizzy glimpse of the islet against the rush of green water below, and felt his shaky laugh of relief stick in his throat. Two of the octopods were swimming strongly for shore, holding the rigid Arzian native carefully above water between them. ”

“ The rest was routine to Philip Alcorn's experience. Men at the bar turned to each other like old friends, forgetting submerged frustrations as readily as they forgot the vicious slash-and-parry on the screen. The place drowsed in a slow and comfortable silence.
The Jaffers man tossed off his drink and dialed another. Alcorn, raising his own, remembered Janice Wynn's letter in his pocket and set the glass down, untasted.
The clippings, she had said, would give him an idea of what he was up against. ”

“ We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of everything beyond their immediate environment—the motives behind that conditioning usually escape us, but that's beside the point—and they did a thorough job of it. The colonists have had no more than a century of freedom since the Bees pulled out, and four generations simply isn't enough time for any subjugated culture to climb from slavery to interstellar flight. ”

“ But there was no denying that it was a horribly convincing dream. The monstrous artifact he had come to investigate—it really was a building of some sort, he saw now, and not a ruin at all—rose closer and closer until its vast top spread out under the bathysphere like a mossy green plateau.
A random eddy of current caught the bathysphere and pushed it gently outward as it sank, so that it missed the edge and fell on toward the bottom, and the barnacled wall that slid up to tower over Fortenay was as blank and final as the rim of the world. ”

“ He was staring back toward the lab with his scrubby beard fluttering in the night wind and his eyes shining like wet marbles.
I looked back to see smoke pouring out of the laboratory windows. Great sparks of light shot out through it but it wasn't until I understood Doc's yammering that I knew what they were.
"They've left the rift!" he was yelling. "They're free—we've let those monsters loose on the world!"
The fire-worms scattered systematically, taking off in every direction like snaky skyrockets. ”

“ The silence bore him down with an implacable weight, and the desire to escape it grew upon him until he found himself running, dodging wildly in and out among stalled vehicles and frozen pedestrians.
He reached the city's edge, but the sun and wind of open country did not dispel his oppression. The sun was as silent as the city, and the breeze was a drear lament in his ears. Loneliness crept at his heels like a black, timorous hound; he felt as if he were the only living thing in a dead and forgotten world. ”

“ He watched eagerly as the red disc of Mars swelled to a mottled globe, blurred already at the edges by atmospheric refraction. Down there on the dead ground of that ancient world he would set up his equipment and flash back his triumphant message to Earth, a fabulous exultant lie that would bring other men like him swarming to the red planet. ”

“ When he opened his eyes again, the Falakian girl had run away. Under the merciless glare of light, the valley was as he had first seen it—a nauseous charnel place of bogs and brambles and mudflats littered with yellowed bones.
In the near distance, a haggard mob of natives cowered like gaping, witless caricatures of humanity, faces turned from the descending blaze of the parachute flare. There was no more music or laughter. The great moths fluttered in silent frenzy, stunned by the flood of light.
"So that's it," Farrell thought dully. ”

“ The stars over our speeding helicar glittered down like far, frosty eyes and the gritty red ocean of desert under us lost its harshness and took on a magic pattern of soft, shifting shadows. Phobos paced us across the black night sky like a swift silver morning-star, and the little gray jackals crept out of their dens and howled at her with all the pent-up loneliness of a million, million years.
Cheryl shivered at their keening, and the thought that she could be as skittish as other women gave me a little jolt of surprise. ”

“ We raised our brows at one another over that, not guessing at the time just what the Balakians really had on the ball.
"For thousands of generations, we have devoted our energies to knowing ourselves and our environment," Gaffa said, "because we know that no species can be truly balanced unless it understands itself. The symbiosis between all life-forms on our planet is the result of that knowledge. We should like to assure ourselves that you are capable of understanding your own kind as well before we offer our services to your Terran Realm—and therein lies the test we have arranged for you." ”

“ Charlie said. "We have about twelve minutes left for deceleration, but we'll never make landing. The Luna V is riddled like a sieve, spewing out heavy-water fuel along with her air ... it's a miracle that a chunk hasn't crashed through our fuel pile or the communicator—or through us. That's what blew up the first four ships, we know now ... if men ever reach the moon they'll first have to develop some sort of armor that will turn this barrage of meteoric dust." ”

“ He knew when he had explored the vacated premises of his newly freed mind that It was only one of many, that all earthmen had Tenants like It, intangible parasitic entities subsisting upon and controlling the human life force.
He thought: No wonder we have wars on Earth! We have no common ground for agreement because we are under Their compulsion. They know our inherent abilities and keep us at each others' throats lest we learn of and destroy them. Everything that man has accomplished has been done in spite of Them. ”

“ She took the hand that Mirrh Yahn y Cona raised as if to defend himself.
"I'm to see that you aren't bored to death here among strangers," she said. "All work and no play isn't good for anyone. Especially," she said to Ellis, "for one so handsome. I didn't dream he'd look so—"
"So Terran," Ellis finished before she could say so human. "And why not? We're from the same original stock, separated ages before our history begins. Martian annals run back for millennia, did you know? Gold mine of information, settle problems our experts have puzzled over for centuries." ”

“ Willard stalled for time by ordering another stinger—a double, this time—and Abe Marker took over.
"How about those pictures of Martian dust storms the boys at Palomar make?" Abe asked. "You can't have dust storms on a marshy planet, can you?"
"Those aren't dust storms," the little man said. "They're clouds of gnats."
"Gnats?" we all said at once, and somebody down the bar, quicker-witted than the rest of us, added: "Gnats to you too, Charlie!"
"A fact," the little man said, but not as if he cared. "They travel in swarms thousands of miles wide, and they bite like hell." ”

“ Farrell, watching the slow spark of curiosity bloom in his eyes, wondered sickly how many years—or how few—must pass before the boy was reduced to the same stupid bovinity as the mother.
Gibson was right, he thought. The compulsion to survive at any cost could be a curse instead of an asset. The degeneracy of these poor devils was a perpetual affront to the race that had put them there. ”

“ We'd get about half-oiled and work up a promising argument about what was wrong with the world. Then, just when we'd got life looking its screwball funniest with our arguments one or the other of us would look out the window and see Joey Pond in his wheelchair, waiting for a one-eyed dog named Charlie to come trotting home across the palmetto flats. ”

“ They brought the ship down, stern first, upon the waiting breast of Venus.
"The Silver Planet," Lowe said in the sudden quiet. "It was to have been the New Earth, remember?"
It was not until then that they learned the reason for Hanlon's quiet. Under cover of the landing he had plundered the supply cabinet for a plastobottle of medicinal alcohol, and was far into the process of drinking himself blind.
He cursed them thickly when they took the bottle from him. "Go out and claim your planet, you synthetic heroes. I don't want any part of it. I wish to hell I'd stayed on Earth." ”

“ Alike in form, we are so far apart in nature that you could not have borne our real presence, so we buried our real selves under a mask of conditioning as deeply as we buried our ship under the ice of your planet's pole. ”

“ Cora was as affectionate as Joey and twice as eager. She made an earnest effort to hypnotize me with that euphoric mating call of hers, but when the khiff root kept me immune she settled down to staring wistfully across the desert toward Areopolis where Joey radiated back at her.
I broke out the emergency rations I lived on while prospecting the asteroids or moon-hopping, and sat down to think. I had to clear myself with Captain Giles or I'd never see Areopolis or the Argonaut Club again. I had to break Shanig's claim against the Annabelle or I'd be an asteroid prospector without a ship. ”