I have no mouth and I must scream.
Admiral, David is dead.
The strange noises stopped for a moment and he could hear someone shouting angrily. There was a pause for a moment, when someone else must have been replying in a softer tone of voice, then more shouting, another silence, and a resumption of the howling and banging.
I have no mouth, and must scream!
I haven’t got a speech, I didn’t plan words, I didn’t even try to. I just knew that I had to get here, to stand here and I knew I wanted you to listen; to really listen, not just pull a face like you’re listening, like you do the rest of the time. A face like you’re feeling instead of processing.
“I have tolerated your gross insubordination, incompetence, cowardice, defiance, and disrespect for as long as I intend to, Admiral Styles. You have been warned dozens of times, and you have steadfastly declined to amend your behavior, despite repeated warnings that my patience was not without limit. Very well. I will not warn you again. You will now accompany Major LaFollet to the brig, where you will be held in close confinement until such time as formal charges are preferred against you before a court-martial board of Her Majesty’s Navy. I have no doubt that those charges will be sustained . . . and you know as well as I what the penalty attached to them will be.”
This is a clear violation of the Prime Directive, Captain.
Imagine you have an entire world to yourself. Then imagine a stranger walks into your camp. I have to hand it to Floyd; he’s got a flair for the dramatic.
“Idiot!” she snapped. “Couldn’t resist it, could you? Coming to play hero.”
So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.
Andy L: I so have to re-read The Forever War one of these days…
In play:
“Marines are adaptable,” she replied. “They improvise and overcome when faced with unexpected obstacles. Just treat it like something minor—like storming a dug-in ceramacrete bunker armed with nothing but a butter knife clenched between your manly teeth—and I’m sure a tough, experienced Marine like you can pull it off.”
“Hah! What kind of wuss Marine needs a butter knife to take one miserable bunker?” Gutierrez demanded with a resonant chuckle. “That’s why God gave us teeth and fingernails!”
“No problem, boys,” he said again. “We’ll all be fine.”
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.
I’m a strict materialist - but the police are brutal materialists.
The police had ambushed their gang in a jewelry shop, acting on a tip-off from an informer.
The Manticoran officer finally lifted his eyes from the forensics packet and nodded. “I understand, Muhammad. No dead bodies. Nothing, in fact, that would be awkward for the police.”
“Such as a rush of people into hospitals with broken bones,” growled the policeman. Again, his eyes moved to Tye. “Or worse.”
Tye smiled gently. “I believe you misinterpret the nature of my art, Lieutenant Hobbs.”
Muhammad snorted. “Save it for the tourists. I’ve seen you in tournaments, sensei. Even playing by the rules, you were scary enough.”
He pointed a finger at Zilwicki. “And this one? I can’t recall ever seeing him in a lotus, contemplating the whichness of what. But I use the same gym he does, and I have seen him bench-press more pounds than I want to think about.”
The policeman straightened and arched his shoulders, as if relieving himself of a small burden. “All right, enough,” he growled. He turned away and headed for the door. “Just remember: no dead bodies; no hospital reports.”
I was in my room when I heard the screaming. Sounded pretty awful, so I came directly here.
Snelund came through the airlock breathing hard. He carried a surgical kit. “Where is she?” he demanded.
“This way, sir.” Flandry let him go ahead. He did not appear to have noticed Flandry’s gun, packed in case of bodyguards. There weren’t any. They might have gossiped.
Flandry opened the door. “I brought you a visitor, Kathryn.” he said.
She uttered a noise that would long run through his nightmares. His Merseian war-knife flew into her hand.
He wrenched the bag from Snelund and pinioned the man in a grip that was not to be shaken. Kicking the door shut behind him, he said, “Any way you choose, Kathryn. Any way at all.”
Snelund began screaming.
Isn’t it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us – and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.