A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.
Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear.
MR. UNDERHILL CAME out from under his hill, smiling and breathing hard. Each breath shot out of his nostrils as a double puff of steam, snow-white in the morning sunshine. Mr. Underhill looked up at the bright December sky and smiled wider than ever, showing snow-white teeth. Then he went down to the village.
“Morning, Mr. Underhill,” said the villagers as he passed them in the narrow street between houses with conical, overhanging roofs like the fat red caps of toadstools.
“Morning, morning!” he replied to each. (It was of course bad luck to wish anyone a good morning; a simple statement of the time of day was quite enough, in a place so permeated with Influences as Sattins Island, where a careless adjective might change the weather for a week.)
I have five times the breathing capacity you do on this planet, Captain. I’m going.
I ought to tell you that we’re now breathing almost pure oxygen here, at about 300 millimetres. So, although the pressure in the ship is less than half its sea-level value on Earth, your lungs are taking in twice as much oxygen as they would on Earth — and still more than they would on Mars or Venus.
Her breathing goes back to normal, or at least what normal has become, and she decides she has sat long enough; she never did like looking back.
The civilian bent over the man, who no longer looked waxy. His face was now a mottled gray and his eyelids were flickering. He had begun to breathe heavily and irregularly, and he was mumbling something I couldn’t understand. The civilian whispered in his ear and the revived man opened his eyes and looked at him.
Some of these men need medical attention.
“Even so—” Jeff tried to push her away. He was too weak to succeed in that task. His wife did not push easily. “The flu is bad enough, Gretchen! You don’t have my resistance to it!”
She rose slowly and shrugged. Gretchen understood the medical logic behind her husband’s words. Dr. Nichols had explained to her at considerable length. People of her time did not have a built-up resistance to strains of disease carried by those born in the future.
She began to disrobe. Gretchen understood the logic, but she did not agree with it. She had her own way of reasoning, which was more tough-minded. Much more.
“Best I develop it, then,” she murmured.
The clinical picture is oversimplified, I agree, but essentially correct, although your method of describing it suggests a new approach to the problem. I, too, am impatient to know what it is that you intend.
"Whether someone deliberately sold the information to this . . . this . . . individual Hayes or not, that information had to come from someone inside the Center. Someone with access to our confidential records. Someone who, if he or she didn’t deliberately sell the information was still criminally—and I use the adverb advisedly, in light of our confidentiality agreements with our patients—negligent. Someone who either gossiped about it where he or she shouldn’t have or allowed someone else unauthorized access.
In either case, I want his—or her—ass. I want it broiled, on a silver platter, with a nice side of fried potatoes, and I intend to see to it that whoever it was never works in this field—or any other branch of the medical profession—in the Star Kingdom again."
And you, gentlemen, have the problem of finding another doctor.
“In the context of the medical weirdness going on here, I have to ask a stupid question: Was he a plant like a spy, or a plant like a preambulatory asparagus?”
It was a mountain of centuries sloping up from the highest antiquity we can conceive, up and up like a mountain whose summit never comes into sight, not to eternity where the thought can rest, but into more and still more time, into freezing wastes and silence of unnameable numbers. It was also strong like a mountain; it’s age no mere morass of time where imagination can sink in reverie, but the living, self-remembering duration which repelled lighter intelligences from its structure as granite flings back waves, itself unwithered and undecayed but able to wither any who approach it unadvised.
I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.
“It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice…
The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can. Hence we rightly, for our sue, distinguish the accidental from the essential. But step outside that frame and the distinction drops down into the void, fluttering useless wings. He had been forced out of the frame, caught up into the larger pattern… “My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.”
I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.
Merlin sank back into his chair like a man unstrung.
Looks like Merlin’s drawbridge no longer goes all the way across the moat, if you catch my meaning.