Roger D. Aycock

“ In the shower, Geddes caught Lowe fingering the pale scar of his appendectomy and frowning thoughtfully. Without his dentures Lowe looked older and uncertain and somehow shrunken, and in spite of his conditioned calm Geddes felt a cold stirring of alarm.
"Forget Hanlon's carping," he said. He punched Lowe in the ribs, trying to be jocular. "Those Foundation medics know what they're about. Come on, we've got to get our beauty sleep before the jumpoff." ”

“ Hovic found his tongue first. "Hanlon was right again. The Connors brought the Terra II down safely after all!"
The makeshift boat touched shore. The girl at the bow stood up, cradling an out-moded blast rifle in her arms.
"Throw away your weapons," she called peremptorily. "And take off those stupid airsuits. We'll have a look at the kind of men you are before you're welcomed to our planet!" ”

“ He's very weak, and argument upsets him."
They found Sean Connors propped upon a ragged couch made from a salvaged acceleration chair, a frail and twisted old man with a bald, freckled scalp and a wild tangle of bristling red beard. The piercing blue stare he turned upon them had the unnatural heat of a mind brooding long past the point of safety.
"So they killed themselves off," he whispered, and made a coughing sound that might have been laughter. "And you're the best they could send to keep the race going."
He blinked angrily when Geddes tried to speak. ”

“ Hovic said, enviously.
They were strapping themselves in for the Terra IV's final flight when Geddes laughed for the first time since the blast-off.
"I think Lowe's right," he said when they stared at him. "I wish I could come back again, after a few hundred generations. I wonder what a whole planet of Hanlons would look like?"
"... and therefore we can say with certainty that we did not descend from Earthmen," Mach Bren concluded his report to the Venusian Archaeological Society. "For how can we possibly conceive of kinship with a people whose skin and hair are black?" ”

“ How could I know what I'd really be like when those cold-blooded Foundation specialists got through with me?"
"It takes a specially adapted kind of man to beat space," Geddes pointed out patiently. "We can't risk neurosis out there, any more than we can risk appendicitis or abscessed teeth. The Foundation learned a lot from those first three failures, Hanlon. This time it's not repeating its old errors."
Hovic came out of the bathroom, replacing his dentures. He was the heaviest of the crew, a muscular Slav with the unimaginative man's natural directness. "You're washed up, Hanlon. ”

“ Lowe said, and choked on the words.
They found nothing to say after that until the impressed urgency of their mission reasserted itself and they turned back to the job at hand. There was still Venus....
They did not rouse Hanlon from his hypnol stupor until the Terra IV fell into her spiral orbit for planetfall. Geddes broke the news to him then, steeling himself against Hanlon's biting irony.
"So you were right," Geddes finished baldly. "Earth is done for. Dead." ”

“ But there's one too many of you. You'll have to draw lots."
He flew into a senile rage when they stood silent, and they saw that he was wholly obsessed by the idea. "Would you argue with Fate, you fools? Or did they send me a crew of unnaturals, with no use for women?" ”