But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed:
TYME SEFARI INC
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.
-“BB”-
He had a right to be satisfied with himself. What he’d been doing had been generalizing. Bottle tops and nuts belonged to the general class of things-that-screwed-onto-things. To take them off, you turned left; to put them on again, you turned right, after making sure that the threads engaged. And since he could conceive of right- and left-handedness, that might mean that he could think of properties apart from objects, and that was forming abstract ideas. Maybe that was going a little far, but…
The victors in war were often those who made the quick decisions. He knew well, however, that some of the losers in war lost because they didn’t think things through.
The harpy must have made one swoop at him already and was circling back for another. It ran into a 6-mm rifle bullet, went into a backward loop and dropped like a stone.
Sometimes it felt like her life was a series of falls from ever-greater heights.
Then they’d be wrong. It’s only our deeds that make us evil, Tanner; they’re what define us, nothing else, not our intentions or feelings. But what are a few bad deeds compared to a life, especially the kinds of lives we can live now?”
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.
Far below, in the boiling sea, a climbing cloud of mushroom-shaped flame filled the spot where the island had been seconds before. The three of them looked at it, silently and unmoving.
The problem is, we really are an island. And the truth is, we really have been marooned. And to compound it all, that old myth is true: we really are sinking, just not in the way we’ve always been led to believe.
Pressures changed, land masses shifted, and the continent had sunk beneath the ocean. All that was left now of the swarming life of that land mass was confined to a chain of islands, once the mountain peaks of the highest range of mountains. These islands, whose sheer sides rose straight from the water, held the last inhabitants of the lost continent. The weeded-out descendants of the victors of uncountable violent contests.
nevermind
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
It was there. Stronger than he had felt it in years. The stiff weight of those million-credit notes had done it. The world all-around was sharp-cut clear and the dice was completely in his control. He knew to the tenth-credit how much the other players had in their wallets and was aware of the cards in the hands of the players behind him.
If you gamble long enough, you’ll always lose – the gambler is always ruined.
The key of strategy… is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory.
Go now. Our journey is done. And may we meet again, in the clearing, at the end of the path.
Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will…
Our destiny is in the stars, so let’s go and search for it.
Jack Holloway found himself squinting, the orange sun full in his eyes.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.