Many, many rules had begun to bend at the hand of nanotechnology, gene therapy, robotics, artificial intelligence. This produced a lot of good, and a lot of bad. This trade-off has always plagued us. When you make waves, you produce peaks and troughs.
Now, the plan here is, throw the blanket over the Vacuubot Extreme Clean, and while it is struggling, trying to get the blanket off of it, you run over and turn it off, making sure not to touch the actual Vacuubot, because it will just zap the crap out of you. Press one when you’re about to throw the blanket.
MAXIM 17: The longer everything goes according to plan, the bigger the impending disaster.
Can’t count on no miracles. Sometimes, you just got to have a plan.
I’m going to put it to you straight. Never mind about being chief engineer of a planet; these days even a farmer needs the best education he can get. Without it he’s just a country bumpkin, a stumbling peasant, poking seeds into the ground and hoping a miracle will make them grow.
One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.
“You claim that evolution stops when a species starts building tools. But suppose two tool-users evolved on the same world? Then evolution might go on until one race was dead. We might have had real problems if the dolphins had had hands.”
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly ninety million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet, whose ape descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
The world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better… with hands… with tools… with horse sense and science and engineering.
“I come to you,” Stevens said seriously, “for the same reason everybody else comes to you when they are really stuck with an engineering problem. So far as I know, you have an unbroken record of solving any problem you cared to tackle."
When it came to explosives and radios, bad things sometimes happened to good engineers.
“Schlock, the entire length of the barrel is an integral part of a multicannon. Plasma couplings and aperture controls are gone, there’s no autotracking…those weapons are now a menace to anyone standing within a hundred meters of you.”
“Perfect. I’m going for intimidation value here.”
Family, can’t live with them, can’t orbitally bombard them back to the foul, oozing proto-plasma they crawled out of, I thought grimly.
“I’ll miss them,” she told him again, still with that dreadful softness, “but I won’t forget. I’ll never forget, and one day—one day, Hamish—we’re going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we do, the only thing I’ll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who’s killing them.”
She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means…Her smile is her revenge.
“So many stars, so many planets,” sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. “I suppose families will be going out to new planets forever, the way we are now.”
“Not forever,” said Jerrodd, with a smile. “It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.”
“I think the geniuses who dreamed up this entire op probably figured there was no point even trying to keep the Four Yahoos from getting back up to their old tricks,” Lithgow muttered. “And they were right. It’d make more sense to try to arm-wrestle entropy!”