Aah, I love me some lush E. E. “Doc” Smith prose!
In play-
Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.
I know that I have fought this same battle a thousand thousand times before…but, perhaps this time I can crush you like the insect you are!
The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.
Dresses like a spider, he looks like a bug, we should all just give him one big hug… Look out, here comes a Spider-Man.
With great power comes great responsibility.
“But I can. Not without a trial. He’ll have one, I assure you, and so will all the animals he turned loose on your people. They’ll be scrupulously, completely fair—and as soon as they’re over, this sick, sadistic piece of garbage and all the others responsible will be hanged like the scum they are.” He met her eye levelly, and his icy voice was soft.
“I swear that to you, Captain, on the honor of the Grayson Navy.”
You know, Ensign, there was a secret behind that carefully cultivated interservice rivalry they had back on Old Earth. In the event of a mutiny you could always persuade the army to shoot the navy, or vice versa, when they could no longer discipline themselves. A hidden disadvantage to a combined service like ours.
Have care!
That must be the chief reason to become sergeant; so you can assign yourself to monitor the most beautiful security risk.
“That’s not how I remember it, Commander.”
“Who’s telling this story, Sergeant?”
"Oooh! I know this one! “A Mind Control test-subject who hasn’t yet had his head re-examined!”
I remembered, I remembered … my life within the Shadow place its inhabitants had called the Earth.
In the morning he arranged passage home to Sol system. Ten thousand years wasn’t enough…no lifetime was enough, unless you lived it in such a way as to make it enough.
We pray for one last landing/
On the globe that gave us birth/
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies/
And the cool, green hills of Earth.
“Out. Out to where the grass meets the sky.” He thought that was a pretty good line, at least considering it was extemporaneous.
The city was distant–over the horizon, no less–and connected to the port only by the spidery length of a monorail. It hauled cargo, for the most part. Nobody seemed too anxious to go to or come from the city.
“Mos Eisley Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. A fifty-foot containment wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem River, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island. All bridges and waterways are mined. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple: once you go in, you don’t come out.
Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison for oneself.
Forty-two.
Were there five? Six? Hundreds? We took a few stumbling steps and they caught us easily.