“Did you say extraterrestrial life?’ asked the reporter, amused. She wasn’t buying this. Nobody believes the weirdos, even if the US military is behind it. Weird but easy to be expected after what I have been through. Who could believe that travel between other worlds was remotely possible?
Dr. Rick Marshall:It boils down to two simple words.
Matt Lauer:Renewable biofuels.
Dr. Rick Marshall:Close. Time warps
Narrator: It’s just a jump to the left
All: And then a step to the right
Narrator: With your hands on your hips
All: You bring your knees in tight
Even smiling makes my face ache.
“By what do we know the First Effect?"
“By the Great Pain of Space,” came the chorus.
I fix ships, not people.
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe. We’ll get a freighter.
“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.”
“At least till I’m out of your atmosphere, then I can throttle back and save on fuel. It’s all turned out pretty well for me,” he said, “assuming this crate actually makes it off the surface, but I’m fairly sure it will.”
There was the sound of splintering wood, and a slat fell out of the side of the crate. From the blackness within, a pair of tiny green reflections gleamed at Dennis.
Dennis could only presume they were eyes, small and spaced no more than an inch apart. The green sparks seemed to lock onto him, and he could not look away. They stared at each other — Earthman and alien.The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied.
Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Looks like we’ve got trouble.
Preventing the destruction of basically everything is the very definition of all hands on deck.
“I’ll show you,” I said. “I’ll walk to the door like a groundhog and come back the way you walk. Watch.” I did so, making the trip back in a slightly exaggerated version of his walk to allow for his untrained eye—feet sliding softly along the floor as if it were deck plates, weight carried forward and balanced from the hips, hands a trifle forward and clear of the body, ready to grasp.
Igor: Walk this way.
[descends a small staircase with the aid of a cane, which he hands to Frankenstein, so that he may hobble down in the same fashion]
Igor: No…this way.
I was thinking earlier that to know this city you must first become penniless, because pennilessness (real pennilessness, I mean not having $2 for the subway) forces you to walk everywhere and you see the city best on foot.
So he said in a soft voice, as his hand fell away from the board and his feet turned away from the Door, “You know, it’s such a beautiful day that I think I’ll walk.”
He walked along the shore, staring at the mirror-flat blueness of the sea. It was true then. There was no distinct remembrance of it. From the second he’d gone through the doorway until now, all was a virtual blank.
The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn’t happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.