Sir, it is standard procedure that the Second Officer accompany the away team.
Roger and Patty had become a well-oiled machine, expert at the business of slaughter.
You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.
The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control.
The System had been seven minutes worth of disrupted. It was a tiny matter, one hardly worthy of note, but in a society where the single driving force was order and unity and promptness and clock-like precision and attention to the clock, reverence of the Gods of the passage of time, it was a disaster of major importance.
People think they own time. They have watches and clocks and digital pulses. But they are wrong. Time owns them.
Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.
Time travel lacks the glamor I expected.
The multinationals who’d been backing Darby and Gentilla lost interest, and time travel had been handed over to historians and scientists.
Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation.
‘Minimal collateral damage’ and ‘Entire star system’ do not belong in the same sentence.
Shut up and get us out of here!
“What do we do now?” Olier asked.
“There’s damn-all we can do,” du Bouvard replied flatly. “Except get the hell out of here before they get around to sending parties ashore to find out just where those divers came from.”
“That sounds like an excellent idea to me,” Olier said fervently, and started barking orders at the rest of their party.
When I say “Run”, run. Run!
Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.
*I suppose it’s our way of declaring who and what we are. We’re not simply escaped prisoners, huddled together like sheep while we run from the wolves. We are the “wolves” of this piece, and we, by God, want the universe to know it! *She snorted in amusement, not at her Marines and their drill, but at herself, and shook her head. I think I may be just a wee bit guilty of hubris where these people are concerned.
Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time … as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?
“There’s no justice without a trial,” Astrid said.
“Tanj! There ain’t no justice!”
“We start thinking that way and we’re not worth a damn thing, Edison. Our prime duty is to protect the citizens. If ANYBODY shoots them, it’s going to be ME.”