H. Beam Piper

“ I didn't want the window in front of me coming in at me with a monster head the size of a couple of oil drums and full of big tusks following it.
The Javelin came up fast, but not as fast as the monster, which seemed to have been injured only in his disposition. He was on the surface already, about fifty yards astern of us, threshing with his forty-foot wing-fins, his neck arched back to strike. I started to swing my gun for the chest shot Joe Kivelson had recommended as soon as it was run out, and then the ship was swung around and tilted up forward by a sudden gust of wind. ”

“ If I were a drinking man, this planet would have made a drunkard of me. Now, you forget about these six years chopped out of your busy life. When you get back here, with an education, you'll be a kid of twenty-four, with a big long life ahead of you and your mind stocked with things you don't have now that will help you [215] make something—and more important, something enjoyable—out of it."
There was a huge crowd at the spaceport to see us off, Tom and Bish Ware and me. Mostly, it was for Bish. If I don't find a monument to him when I get back, I'll know there is no such thing as gratitude. ”

“ I did not follow this man you call Ravick here to this ... this running-hot-and-cold Paradise planet, and I did not spend five years fraternizing with its unwashed citizenry and creating for myself the role of town drunkard of Port Sandor, to have him taken from me and lynched after I have arrested him. People do not lynch my prisoners. ”

“ According to his fingerprints, Steve Ravick was really a woman named Ernestine Coyón, who had died of acute alcoholism in the free public ward of a hospital at Paris-on-Baldur fourteen years ago."
"Why, that's incredible!" the Reverend Zilker burst out, and Joe Kivelson was saying: "Steve Ravick isn't any woman...."
"Least of all one who died fourteen years ago," Bish agreed. "But the fingerprints were hers. A pauper, dying in a public ward of a big hospital. And a man who has to change his identity, and who has small, woman-sized hands. And a crooked hospital staff surgeon. ”

“ There's always plenty of hot food to hand on a hunter-ship; no regular meal-times, and everybody eats, as he sleeps, when he has time. This is the only time when a whole hunter crew gets together, after a monster has been killed and cut up and the ship is resting on the bottom and nobody has to stand watch. ”

“ Since it is not proper for reporters to loot on the job, I had gotten outside in my jeep early and was going ahead, swinging my camera back to get the parade behind me. Might furnish a still-shot illustration for somebody's History of Fenris in a century or so.
Broadway was empty until we came to the gateway to the spaceport area. There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfway to the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcher pointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man in an olive-green uniform stood. ”

“ As far as Dad and I could find out, it was still bringing the same price on Terra as it always had. It looked to us as if Ravick and Leo Belsher, who was the Co-op representative on Terra, and Mort Hallstock were simply pocketing the difference. I was just as sore about what was happening as anybody who went out in the hunter-ships. Tallow-wax is our only export. All our imports are paid for with credit from the sale of wax. ”

“ Boyd," he said. None of this sonny-boy stuff; Ranjit Singh was a man of dignity, and he respected the dignity of others. "If I admit you to the spaceport, will you give these people the facts exactly as you learn them?"
"That's what the Times always does, Lieutenant." Well, almost all the facts almost always.
"Will you people accept what this Times reporter tells you he has learned?"
"Yes, of course." That was Oscar Fujisawa.
"I won't!" That was Joe Kivelson. "He's always taking the part of that old rumpot of a Bish Ware." ”

“ Bish says no story ends, ever. He's wrong. Stories die, and nothing in the world is deader than a dead news story. But before they do, they hatch a flock of little ones, and some of them grow into bigger stories still. What happens after the ship lifts into the darkness, with the pre-dawn glow in the east, will be another, a new, story. ”

“ There are a dozen or so names for it, but mostly it is called a meat-grinder.
The things are always hungry and try to eat anything that moves. The mere fact that I would be as poisonous to it as any of the local flora or fauna would be to me made no difference; this meat-grinder was no biochemist. It was coming straight for me, all its tentacles writhing.
I had had my Sterberg out as soon as I'd heard the noise. I also remembered that my radio was on, and that I was supposed to comment on anything of interest that took place around me. ”

“ But let a story hit the big papers on Terra, Revolution Breaks Out on Fenris—and that'll be the story I'll send to Interworld News—and watch what happens."
"I will tell you what will happen," Bish Ware said. "A lot of people will get killed. That isn't important, in itself. People are getting killed all the time, in a lot worse causes. But these people will all have friends and relatives who will take it up for them. Start killing people here in a faction fight, and somebody will be shooting somebody in the back out of a dark passage a hundred years from now over it. ”

“ Any time a hunter-ship man doesn't have his knife on, he isn't wearing anything else. I wondered about his being in port now. I knew Joe Kivelson wouldn't bring his ship in just to meet the Peenemünde, with only a couple of hundred hours' hunting left till the storms and the cold.
"I thought you were down in the South Ocean," I said.
"There's going to be a special meeting of the Co-op," he said. "We only heard about it last [10] evening," by which he meant after 1800 of the previous Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-ship captain who had called the Javelin by screen. ”

“ The Times has one of these pillar-buildings, and we have the whole thing to ourselves. In a city built for a quarter of a million, twenty thousand people don't have to crowd very closely on one another. Naturally, we don't have a top landing stage, but except for the buttresses at the corners and solid central column, the whole street floor is open.
Tom hadn't said anything after we left the stacks of wax and the men guarding them. We came up a vehicle shaft a few blocks up Broadway, and he brought the jeep down and floated it in through one of the archways. ”

“ The long years ahead, I can't imagine them now, will be spent on the Times, and I ought to learn things to fit me for that. But I can't get rid of the idea about carniculture growth of tallow-wax. We'll have to do something like that. The demand for the stuff is growing, and we don't know how long it'll be before the monsters are hunted out. We know how fast we're killing them, but we don't know how many there are or how fast they breed. I'll talk to Tom about that; maybe between us we can hit on something, or at least lay a foundation for somebody else who will. ”

“ Respect for the dignity of others is a fine thing in an officer, but like journalistic respect for facts, it can be carried past the point of being a virtue. I thought he was over-estimating Joe Kivelson's self-control. ”

“ Everything else, however, is not equal. The Fenris year is a trifle shorter than the Terran year we use for Atomic Era dating, eight thousand and a few odd Galactic Standard hours. In that time, Fenris makes almost exactly four axial rotations. This means that on one side the sun is continuously in the sky for a thousand hours, pouring down unceasing heat, while the other side is in shadow. You sleep eight hours, and when you get up and go outside—in an insulated vehicle, or an extreme-environment suit—you find that the shadows have moved only an inch or so, and it's that much hotter. ”

“ A hunter-boat captain, even a good one like Joe Kivelson, won't make much more in a year than Dad and I make out of the Times.
Chemically, tallow-wax isn't like anything else in the known Galaxy. The molecules are huge; they can be seen with an ordinary optical microscope, and a microscopically visible molecule is a curious-looking object, to say the least. They use the stuff to treat fabric for protective garments. It isn't anything like collapsium, of course, but a suit of waxed coveralls weighing only a couple of pounds will stop as much radiation as half an inch of lead. ”

“ There were a couple of little spots on Murell's skin that were beginning to turn raw-liver color. The raw poison hadn't gotten into his blood, but some of it, with impurities, had filtered through the cloth, and he'd absorbed enough of it through his skin to make him seriously ill. The cop jabbered some more into the radio, and the laborer with the lifter brought it and let it down, and Murell sat down on his luggage. Tom lit a cigarette and gave it to him, and told him to remain perfectly still. In a couple of minutes, an ambulance was coming, its siren howling. ”

“ There are a lot of stinks around Port Sandor, though the ventilation system carries most of them off before they can spread out of their own areas. The plant that reprocesses sewage to get organic nutrients for the hydroponic farms, and the plant that digests hydroponic vegetation to make nutrients for the carniculture vats. The carniculture vats themselves aren't any flower gardens. And the pulp plant where our synthetic lumber is made. But the worst stink there is on Fenris is a tallow-wax fire. ”

“ As soon as the cross hairs touch the target, just grab the trigger as though it was a million sols getting away from you. Well, sixteen thousand; that's what a monster's worth now, Murell prices. Jerking won't have the least effect on your hold whatever."
So that was why I'd had so much trouble making a pistol shot out of Tom, and why it would take a special act of God to make one out of his father. And that was why monster-hunters caused so few casualties in barroom shootings around Port Sandor, outside of bystanders and back-bar mirrors. ”

“ Each of those plastic-covered cylinders was a thousand pounds; one of the claw-derricks was picking up two or three of them at a grab....
I was still figuring when shouts of alarm on my right drew my head around. There was an uprush of flame, and somebody began screaming, and I could see an ambulance moving toward the center of excitement and firemen in asbestos suits converging on a run. One of the piles must have collapsed and somebody must have been splashed. I gave an involuntary shudder. Burning wax was hotter than melted lead, and it stuck to anything it touched, worse than napalm. ”

“ Joe Kivelson said, when we were back in the underwater calm again. "We'll have to stay under till the wind's over. Don't anybody move around or breathe any deeper than you have to. We'll have to conserve oxygen."
"Isn't the boat equipped with electrolytic gills?" Murell asked.
"Sure, to supply oxygen for a maximum of six men. We have sixteen in here."
"How long will our air last, for sixteen of us?" I asked.
"About eight hours."
It would take us fifty to get to Port Sandor, running submerged. The wind wouldn't even begin to fall in less than twenty. ”

“ There's always something that has to be picked up personally, usually an interview with some VIP traveling through. This time, though, the big story coming in on the Peenemünde was a local item. Paradox? Dad says there is no such thing. He says a paradox is either a verbal contradiction, and you get rid of it by restating it correctly, or it's a structural contradiction, and you just call it an impossibility and let it go at that. In this case, what was coming in was a real live author, who was going to write a travel book about Fenris, the planet with the four-day year. ”