According to myth, the Earth was created in six days. Now, watch out! Here comes Genesis! We’ll do it for you in six minutes!
Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
“Hey, Howard! You’re alive!”
“What are you talking about, man? I wasn’t in the bathroom THAT long, was I?”
Dave, I’m afraid.
Emily, you aren’t as unique as you may think you are. Oh, the injuries you’ve survived probably are. At least, I can’t think of another case in my own or Alfred’s experience in which someone survived physical damage as extreme as it clearly was in yours. But people who are as badly injured as you were take damage in a lot of ways. Obviously, I’ve never had access to any of your case history. And I’ve never probed Honor for information about it—not that she’d have given it to me, even if I had. But I have to ask you. Like Honor, you don’t regenerate. Is that the reason? Are you afraid a child of yours might share that inability?"
Will these heal up? Good. If you can’t pass for human, you’re not much good to us.
“We’re still learning how to function in this world,” Mom said. “It helps that every time we make mistakes about being Earthlings, our neighbors all assume they’re mistakes about being American.”
We’re from France.
Mickey, what’s Pre-Revolutionary France doing on a spaceship?
Looks like a rumba. Don’t be scared.
He cadged one or two dances with women who knew him well enough not to mind his height, but all of them were depressingly married or attached.
You’ve done a man’s job, sir. I guess you’re through, huh?
“Such a sentimental tradition for a modern Service,” Helva murmured. “Blowing Taps at sundown.”
The dancer was under a suspended spotlight, floating in and out of a yellow cone spilling through the still air. He was a tap-dancing fool in top hat and tails, spats and boiled shirt. Like all the best dancers, he made it look easy. The soles of his black shoes and the metal foot of his cane hammered a complex tattoo that echoed in the unseen cavern of the hub.
Who’s the more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?
Listen to me, Agent! I don’t care how long it takes, if you count on your fingers and toes or use a million pieces of paper. Solving the problem is solving the problem. Solve this problem!
“Young man, you’re new to the Service. You haven’t yet learned the team play, the give-and-take of diplomacy. I shall expect you to observe closely the work of the experienced negotiators of the mission. You must learn the importance of subtlety.”
“The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications - in short, all the goo and dribble - he found he had nothing left. Everything cancelled out.
Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed.”
“So that’s why you make such a fiendishly effective diplomat!” she said with something very like an air of triumph. “I couldn’t believe how well a total novice was reading us. Now I know—you were cheating!”
“What’s the matter with that?” said Kelly.
Tom thought a minute, then grinned. “Why, nothing! That’s just the sort of thing they’ll expect from him!”