Being disintegrated makes me very angry! [huff, puff] Very angry indeed!
I’m disappointed in you, Adrian. I’m very disappointed. Reassembling myself was the first trick I learned. It didn’t kill Osterman. Did you really think it would kill me? I have walked across the surface of the sun. I have witnessed events so tiny and so fast, they could hardly be said to have occurred at all. But you, Adrian, you’re just a man. The world’s smartest man poses no more threat to me than does its smartest termite.
There are enough real enemies and threats in the world without having to invent imaginary ones.
MAXIM 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less.
“Just promise me you’ll eat and drink very little tonight, Balveda. I’d like to think there was one person up there on my side, and it might as well be my worst enemy.”
Watch out for a man whose enemies keep disappearing.
…for treecats were less complicated than humans, and for all their intelligence, they held to a simple code. For them, those who threatened them or their adopted humans came in only two categories: those who had been suitably dealt with, and those who were still alive.
I am a wild beast of no laws and no society. I want no laws. I want no more civilized things.
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing.
The more you love, the more you can love–and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had Time Enough, he could Love all of the majority who are decent and just.
I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life - anybody’s life; my life. All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.
I stare at him, trying to comprehend what he’s done. He saved Magiano from falling overboard. He saved me. He is taking this mission seriously, however much he loathes us.
“Major LaFollet—” she gestured briefly to the Grayson “—and my other armsmen were the ones who actually saved Willard and me both,” she said, and her face tightened a bit more, for of the three men who had saved her life that dreadful day, only Andrew LaFollet was still alive.
What if he can’t save me? What if trying destroys us both?
“It’s really cool you guys seem ready to do battle and stuff, but I’ve never done battle. I’ve just pushed some people and run away!”
“Save one.”
“What?”
“Save one person.”
Not that it was going to make any difference at that late date, he reflected with grim pleasure. Everything he and his squadron had done for the last three and a half T-months all came down to that transmission’s handful of seconds . . . and once it was made, nothing could save the Star Empire of Manticore.
“Where are those transmissions you intercepted? What have you done with those plans?”
“We intercepted no transmissions. This is a consular ship. We’re on a diplomatic mission…”
“If this is a consular ship, where is the Ambassador?”
It’s a time-honored truism of diplomacy that the most resented epithet is the one most accurately depicting the deficiencies of the recipient.
We’re instant ambassadors. Just add robot body and voila! If they’d told us anything real, they might have had to kill us.