Theodore Sturgeon

“ Jeremy thought carefully. "Why didn't I ever touch a person before?" "I don't know," said Fuzzy. "It has something to do with being born in this house, I think." "I guess maybe," said Jeremy doubtfully. "I'm hungry," said the monster, settling itself on Jeremy's stomach as he turned on his back. "Oh, all right," Jeremy said. "The next lecture?" "Yes," said Fuzzy eagerly. "Dream bright, now. The big things that you say, lecturing. Those are what I want. Never mind the people there. Never mind you, lecturing. The things you say." The strange blood flowed as Jeremy relaxed. ”

“ Jeremy blinked. He had been staring at the fine crack in the ceiling for so long that his eyes hurt.
"What are you doing?" asked the monster. "Dreaming real," said Jeremy. "I am grown up and sitting in the big empty lecture place, talking to the girl with the brown hair that shines. Her name's Catherine." "What are you talking about?" "Oh, all the funny dreams. Only--" "Well?" "They're not so funny." The monster scurried over to him and pounced on his chest. "Time to sleep now. And I want to--" "No," said Jeremy. ”

“ Nowadays, of course, the whole process is enormously speeded up. You know the potentialities of Mars. Uranium, iron, diamond-coal and drugs. Why, it's an unlimited opportunity for whoever controls it. For perhaps two generations, Mars will look to Earth for government and guidance. But then there will be patriots, Jeremy. Earth will find herself with a competitor instead of a dominion. And the way that competitor will be run will gradually swing the direction of control the other way—or else. Genex isn't out after a world. Genex wants two worlds—the system—the galaxy, if you like. ”

“ All that time the old man talked. It was mostly bragging about the job he'd done decoding the wire he had. It was mostly Greek to me.
"I have a record here," he says, swishin' his hunk of wire around, "of a phase of the industrial revolution in Central Europe that will have the historians gnashing their teeth. But have I said anything? Not me. Not Sykes!
"I'll have the history of mankind written in such detail, with such authority, that the name of Sykes will go into the language as a synonym for the miraculously accurate." ”

“ I'm having a dream," said Jeremy. "When I sleep, all my dreams go away. Or they're just pretend dreams. I'm having a real dream now." "What are you dreaming now?" asked the monster. "I am dreaming that I'm grown up--" "Seven feet tall and very fat," said the monster. "You're silly," said Jeremy. ”

“ As if the plastic itself were the track of a writing-brush, it spelled the two words:
I REMEMBER
"That's for me," breathed Phyllis. "And I'm a dope. The memory without brains—even I know about that phenomenon. Now that I see it done, I remember a demonstration in school, where a cube was compression-molded into a spool-shape. ”

“ Sykes studied that set-up for years before he figured the particular squiggle in that wire that would start that transmitter to sending. Where was it sending to? Why? Sure, he thought about that. But that didn't matter to him.
What was supposed to happen when the tape ran out? Who or what would come and look at it when it was all done? You know, he didn't care. He just wanted to read that tape, is all. Seems there's a lot of guys write history books and stuff. And he wanted to call them liars. He wanted to tell them the way it really was. Can you imagine? ”

“ And I gave it to the monster, and it ate the knowledge and spiced it with the things it made me do in my real dreams. It made me trip a man up on a hat, of all absurd things, and fall into a subway excavation. And when I was in my teens, I was right by the excavation to see it happen. And that's the way with all of them! All the horrible accidents I have witnessed, I have half-remembered before they happened. There's no stopping any of them. ”

“ Power is rationed, and it is costing Genex a fortune for the piddling amount they need to process sheet-stock into pipe. Their advantage, of course, is to procure the space for themselves and get rid of one more independent outfit."
"Uh-huh. The fight is really over a much bigger thing than pipe. Hmm. And the outfit that finds a way to ship pipe in less space than sheet-stock, gets the contract and for once has a solid footing against the corporation's expansion."
"But how can you do it, Jeremy? How can you possibly ship pipe in less space than stacks of plastic sheet?" ”

“ He is real hoarse. "Kemp! They've been here!"
I began to get the idea. The lower chamber is empty. The upper one is full. The whole set-up is arranged to run off a new recording. And where is Sykes' thirty years' work?
He starts to laugh. I look at him. I can't take that. The place is too small for all that noise. I never heard anybody laugh like that. Like short screams, one after the other, fast. He laughs and laughs.
I carry him out. I put him down outside and go back in for my gear. I can hear him laughing out there and that busted-up voice of his echoing in the gulch. ”

“ He said, "Talk, now."
"I was doing all right," she said in a low voice. "I pulled lots of—of deals for General Export. They want everything. They want the entire Colonial trade—ships, supplies, personnel, everything. They're getting it, too, any and every way they can. They'll have Mars when they're through."
"Then what? They're still under government authority."
"Oh, it's long-range, Jeremy. You remember your history. There's a colonial phase, after discovery and exploration. Colonizing is a job in itself—development doesn't really set in for quite a while. ”

“ He thinks you're funny." Mummy stood over the crib, looking down at him. It seemed to be the frown that looked at him, while the eyes looked past. Finally she wet her lips and patted his head. "Good night, baby." "Good night, Mummy." He closed his eyes. Mummy tiptoed out. The monster kept right on doing it. It was nap-time the next day, and for the hundredth time Mummy had kissed him and said, "You're so good about your nap, Jeremy!" Well, he was. He always went straight up to bed at nap-time, as he did at bedtime. Mummy didn't know why, of course. Perhaps Jeremy did not know. ”

“ Inside the building they turned to the right elevator bank and dropped to the cafeteria two levels below. There was no conversation in the elevator due to the silent presence of the two men who had followed them from the gatehouse. Jeremy glared at them, but the younger man refused to catch his eye and stared at the ceiling, whistling softly. The other man gazed at Phyllis's feet.
"I think," Jeremy said, as they emerged, "that you have hired these pugs just to bolster your ego. You'll have men following you whatever you have to do." ”

“ He didn't answer that but mumbled a lot of stuff.
Something like this.
"They knew we'd reached the atomic age. They wanted to be told when. The transmitter did just that. They came and took the recordings and refilled the machine.
"They sealed off the room with something they thought only controlled atomic power could break into. This time the transmitter was triggered to human beings in that room. Your torch did it, Kemp—that three-hundred-years-in-the-future torch! They think we have atomic power! They'll come back!" ”

“ Could I make her hair golden?" "Who is she?" countered the monster. "She is a girl who will be born here in about twenty years," said Jeremy. The monster snuggled closer to his neck. "If she is to be born here, then of course you can change her hair. Hurry and do it and go to sleep." Jeremy laughed delightedly. "What happened?" asked the monster. "I changed it," said Jeremy. "The girl behind her squeaked like the mouse with its leg caught. Then she jumped up. It's a big lecture-room, you know, built up and away from the speaker-place. ”

“ He thought at first that maybe the transmitter was busted, but after a year or two of examining the machines without touching them he began to realize that there was a gear-train waiting by the tape where it fed through the gismo that crimped it.
This gear train was fixed to start the transmitter, see? But it was keyed to a certain crimp in the tape. In other words, when something happened somewhere on earth that was just the right thing, the crimper would record it and the transmitter would get keyed off. ”

“ Plastics are an analogical approach to women, and some of 'em come pretty close. Some day maybe we'll all be familiar with a plastic that will react differently under the same stimulus, the way you do. Laughter this time, tears the next, whichever seems to be expected.' I didn't think it was very flattering."
Jeremy stared at her, comprehension sparking, flaming, coruscating in his brain. He said hoarsely:
"Give me the compact. I've got to get it to a lab." ”

“ I will be bald on top and will wear eyeglasses like little thick ashtrays. I will give lectures to young things about human destiny and the metempsychosis of Plato." "What's a metempsychosis?" asked the monster hungrily. Jeremy was four and could afford to be patient. "A metempsychosis is a thing that happens when a person moves from one house to another." ”

“ The inner pipe is a condensed plastic—a patented process, by the way. This plastic, while undergoing the 'memorizing' phenomenon so beautifully explained by Miss Exeter, restores its original density as well as its original form. The inner pipe, then, is simply condensed more than the one which surrounds it, and so on until the six are nested. Then the whole is compression, molded into rods of precisely the dimensions of those admirably compact ones produced by General Export. ”

“ Sykes died, and after two years they tracked Gordon Kemp down and brought him back, because he was the only man who knew anything about the death. Kemp had to face a coroner's jury in Switchpath, Arizona, a crossroads just at the edge of the desert, and he wasn't too happy about it, being city-bred and not quite understanding the difference between "hicks" and "folks." ”

“ Commissioner, I ask that space for shipment of pipe to Mars be allotted to my company because the stowage is as compact as any product on the market, because I can ship approximately nine point three times as much pipe per cube unit as my nearest competitor, and because I can deliver pipe per unit length at eleven per cent cheaper than anyone else on earth! ”

“ Her ears grew long, grew until they were like donkey's ears, like rabbit's ears, like horrible, long hairy spider's legs. Her teeth lengthened into tusks. Her arms shrivelled into jointed straws, and her body thickened. ”