Edmond Hamilton

“ Like children who have found strange, ungainly creatures and wish to know how they live. And as they entered his mind, Kellard's mind entered theirs, fused with them, and there was again the dizzying whirl of memories and feelings that were not his own, that his different, more brutishly physical nature could never apprehend more than dimly. ”

“ He stubbed his toe, and he sat down and cried."
"You tried to spare me this," said Halfrich after a little while. "Thanks for that, Kellard. It didn't work, but thanks anyway."
Kellard said, "Look, no one else knows. No one else is ever likely to know. The only place where the men of matter and the children of stars could meet is a place like Sunside, and how many such meetings would ever by chance happen? We don't have to tell everyone, to take the heart and eagerness out of them by letting them know they'll always be second-best in space." ”

“ Shay began, and broke off and then went on, "I mean, if the star-drive is perfected as soon as some people say it will be, I could maybe be one of the first ones out there? Sir?"
"You could be," said Kellard. "Someone's going to be first. The stars are waiting. All we have to do is go out there and keep going, and the stars will be ours, just like the planets here are, all ours, forever and amen."
Shay looked at him puzzledly, and shuffled, and then went away. Halfrich had been listening, and watching. ”

“ The recording telescope-cameras and the radar, Halfrich ordered focused on the place of the odd-shaped rocks. And then, sitting there on Sunside, they watched. They waited.
Nothing.
Kellard's hopes began to rise. He was right, he told himself, it couldn't happen again.
"How long," he asked, "are we going to sit waiting for nothing because a radar made a screwy record? If those anti-heaters quit for five minutes, we're fried."
Halfrich looked at him bleakly. "I'll tell you how long. Till you tell the truth, and we see the truth for ourselves. That's how long." ”

“ Halfrich thought about that. And then he shook his head. "No. We've stubbed our toe. We've learned we're not and never will be the sole inheritors of the universe. All right, we'll accept the fact and go on. The planets will be ours, just the same. And someday—" He paused, then said, "—someday, maybe, the sons of the planets and the children of stars will take hands, know each other. No, Kellard. ”

“ Then he looked at Kellard and said, "All right, let's have it. Why did you quit?"
Kellard shrugged. "It was all in my letter of resignation. I'm getting a bit old and tired for Survey, I—"
"Bull," said Halfrich. "It was something about that crack-up on Sunside, wasn't it?"
Kellard said slowly, "Yes. The deaths of Binetti and Morse, and the after-effects of that shock, made me feel I didn't have it any more."
Halfrich looked at him. "You've had crack-ups before. You've seen men die. You've had almost as many years in Survey as I have, and you've taken as many jolts. You're lying, Kellard." ”

“ A cold feeling came over Kellard. He had thought that he had covered everything, but he had calculated from insufficient data.
He kept his nerve. A radar record was not like a photograph, they couldn't prove much from that, they certainly couldn't guess the truth from it. They must not guess the truth.
He laughed mirthlessly. "A radar record made on Sunside isn't worth the paper it's on. The storms of radiation there make radar practically unreliable."
Halfrich was watching him keenly. ”

“ The whole world would somehow be miraculously transformed—but it wasn't. This tree was here when men first reached the Moon, and Mars, and Venus and the rest, but it didn't know about that, it didn't change because of it. ”

“ He walked into the living-room where his grandfather's desk still stood beneath a window, and looked out. The window faced northward, along the California coastal cliffs that run north along Morro Bay to Big Sur. The Pacific foamed and surged against the huge broken stones beneath the cliffs, and the hills, somber now with a tinge of autumn, shouldered massively up toward the east from the cliff road. ”

“ Kellard remembered that when he had come this way before, Binetti had quoted something, a line from William Blake's poems, he had said. "The desire of the moth for the star." And that was what we were, he thought. Three little moths, going right into the furnace, and I was the only one to get out of it, but now I'm going back.
The Y-90 went into its landing pattern. It skimmed over the dark side of Mercury, the black cliffs and peaks and chasms that never saw the Sun, and then light seemed to burst ragingly up from all the horizon ahead of them, and they were over Sunside. ”