It had been a gift from his ex-wife. It was the only useful thing she ever gave to him.
Magenta: I ask for nothing…nothing.
Frank: And you shall receive it…in abundance!
I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing.
The density of matter in space, which had been lessening steadily, was now approximately constant at one atom per four hundred cubic centimeters. Their speed was therefore about a hundred thousand parsecs per hour; and, even allowing for the slowing up at both ends due to the density of the medium, the trip should not take over ten days.
It’s only the arrangement of matter that has changed, like a deck of cards being reshuffled. But life is like a Straight Flush: once you shuffle, it’s gone.
The potentialities of a race are passed on unchanged—except for mutation—from parent to child. They may be shuffled and dealt and shuffled again, producing an inconceivable number of unique individuals, but the genes are unchanged.
How is it that you keep mutating and can still be the same virus?
As far as Rosemary knew, all Sianats were infected with the virus during childhood, at which point they ceased thinking of themselves as individuals, but rather as plural entities–a Pair. They were then encouraged to go out into the galaxy in order to share the Whisperer’s gifts with species that could never know them first hand (the virus had yet to jump to other species.)
The Shawcross virus was to be a masterful piece of biological clockwork (the likes of which William Paley could never have imagined - and which no godless evolutionist would dare attribute to the “blind watchmaker” of chance). Its single strand of RNA would describe, not one, but four potential organisms.
There is nothing so patient, in this world or any other, as a virus searching for a host.
It gets to be a habit. Most of us manage to keep our body count quite low. It’s the neighborly way to live.
You see, Doug, a large part of being insane is having been insane. If you were paranoid for a year, a ’doc couldn’t cure you. Your year of insanity would have formed habits. The ’doc would change your metabolism without changing your paranoid habits of thinking. You’d need a human psychotherapist.
“He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.”
Never diagnosed the enemy before.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend … even if it’s a monster.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
I’m not having the best of days here, Lillian, and the one thing I’m sure of is that we really, really don’t want to add any new enemies to our list.
Is that what happens to us? A life of conflict with no time for friends … so that when it’s done, only our enemies leave roses.
P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.
In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there’s ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?