For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.
As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy - therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal — since there always are betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented … I think that history shows that a cell of three is best — more than three can’t agree on when to have dinner, much less when to strike." "When the number is as high as four, chances are even that one is a spy.
“Our country use satellites to spy on its own people?’
'Well, the satellites go all around the world. They just don’t bother to turn them off over the US.”
Your satellites are pointing in the wrong direction.
“Inasmuch as Mars’s outermost moon is called Deimos, and the next Phobos,” he said, “I think I shall name the third moon of Mars—Bottomos.”
“You’re from Mars?”
The truth is, I’m a little green man from Alpha Centauri, a beautiful place. You ought to see it.
The little green man was sitting on the car’s radiator. “Hi, Mack,” he said. “You look like hell, but I guess you earned the right to. Drinking is sure a disgusting habit.”
In the capital city of Dar, which rules thousands of useful planets, and has visited millions of useless ones — like Earth — Al Hanley occupies a large glass cage in a place of honor as a truly amazing specimen. There is a pool in the middle of it, from which he drinks often and in which he has been known to bathe. It is filled with a constantly flowing supply of a beverage that is delicious beyond all deliciousness, that is to the best whiskey of Earth as the best whiskey of Earth is to bathtub gin made in a dirty bathtub!
Mmm. They call it Mudder’s Milk. All the protein, vitamins and carbs of your grandma’s best turkey dinner, plus fifteen percent alcohol.
Today, gene-tailored microbes refine gold and other vital elements directly from sea water. Organic solvents, once unbelievably dumped into sensitive watersheds by shortsighted businessmen, are now recycled through filters grown specially for the purpose by pampered, well-fed fabricows. And these same animals’ modified milk glands produce lubricants to replace long-vanished petroleum oil in our vehicles. In this way we make use of efficient fabrication methods evolved over billions of years by Nature herself.
Human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what I say it is. It’s what your biology says it is–what your genes say it is.
The cells inside the meteor were all dead, but there was enough intact genetic material to reveal that it hadn’t been blasted straight off the surface of any of the known DNA worlds. It was from a mature divergent branch of the panspermia. It must have originated on a world of its own.
Two brothers, in a van, And then a meteor hits, And they ran as fast as they could from giant cat monsters. And then a tornado came.
Millions of years ago, a meteorite made of vibranium, the strongest substance in the universe, struck the continent of Africa, affecting the plant life around it. And when the time of man came, five tribes settled on it and called it Wakanda.
If a statistician is looking for an example of a highly improbable event, he can hardly pick a more vivid one than the chance of a man being hit by a meteorite. And, if he adds the condition that the meteorite hit him between the eyes so as to counterfeit the wound made by a 32-caliber bullet, the improbability becomes astronomical cubed. So how’s a person going to outmaneuver a universe that finds it easier to drill a man through the head that way than postpone the day of his death?
Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.
By day, Addyer was a statistician. He concerned himself with such matters as Statistical Tables, Averages and Dispersions, Groups That Are Not Homogenous, and Random Sampling. At night, Addyer plunged into an elaborate escape fantasy divided into two parts. Either he imagined himself moved back in time a hundred years with a double armful of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, best-sellers, hit plays, and gambling records; or else he imagined himself transported forward in time a thousand years to the Golden Age of perfection.
If they believe it is escape , who am I to say it is not?
Psychologists once locked an ape in a room, for which they had arranged only four ways of escaping. Then they spied on him to see which of the four he would find. The ape escaped a fifth way.