“I am tired of safe places, and roofs, and walls around me.”
"Survival’s noble and all, but what good is it without the freedom to live as you choose?”
“A question you have the luxury to ask because you survive."
Being split in two halves is no theory with me, Doctor. I have a human half, you see, as well as an alien half, submerged, constantly at war with each other. Personal experience, Doctor. I survive it because my intelligence wins out over both, makes them live together. Your intelligence would enable you to survive as well.
Don’t you understand? said the weak, dragging thought. *You know how the esprojector works. You know I could have probed Anglesey’s mind in Anglesey’s brain without making enough interference to be noticed. And I could not have probed a wholly non-human mind at all, nor could it have been aware of me. The filters would not have passed such a signal. Yet you felt me in the first fractional second. It can only mean a human mind in a nonhuman brain.
You are not the half-corpse on Jupiter V any longer. You’re Joe—Joe-Anglesey.*
Oops, double post.
Memories tell me who I was, not who I’ll become. They don’t fix the present any more than they fix the past.
About every five minutes it floods his mind with a new set of crystal-sharp memories from random times in the past. The effect is…hideous.
With crystalline certainty there came the knowledge that I was welcome. I said, “Get out of there. Get out and stay out.” The Grog did nothing. Like the knowledge I’d gained yesterday afternoon, the conviction stayed: I was welcome, welcome.
Let you alone! That’s all very well, but how can I leave myself alone ? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
“Don’t bother with it” Wilson said on sudden impulse. “It’s a lot of utter hogwash anyhow.” The other Bob Wilson sat up with a jerk, then looked slowly around. An expression of surprise gave way to annoyance.
I mean, you can’t be a revolutionary after the revolution, can you? Didn’t we all struggle so that kids like Lil wouldn’t have to?
“Unfortunately, my own star nation is still in the grip of a certain revolutionary fervor,” Giancola observed. “That sort of enthusiasm is an uncomfortable fit for the pragmatic requirements of effective interstellar diplomacy.”
That’s terrible. And yet, not our problem.
“The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.”
How clandestine.
“Brody’s got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, he speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom, he’ll blend in, disappear, you’ll never see him again. With any luck, he’s got the grail already.”
Perhaps not totally SF, but Holy Grail, Immortal Knight…close enough (IMHO)
Well, I speak twenty languages. Pick one.
Sid Chamberlain had been disgruntled because he couldn’t get a story about the Martians having developed atomic energy. It took him a few minutes to understand the newest development, but finally it dawned on him.
“Hey! You’re reading that!” he cried. “You’re reading Martian!”
“That’s right,” Penrose told him. “Just reading it right off. I don’t get the two items after the atomic weight, though. They look like months of the Martian calendar. What ought they to be, Mort?”
We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.
“The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water… The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water…”