“It must have been built with tremendous accuracy.”
“Yes. The Egyptions did the same thing. So did the Indians of Central and Southern America.”
One of the oddities that had led the then Private John Mullins from the Marines to the insertion teams was his ease with languages. What oddity of genetics had permitted a farm boy from Gryphon to smoothly learn nine languages, and he was working on Egyptian, was unsure. All that he knew was that he only had to hear one for a few days and before he even realized it, he was idiomatic.
EV-9D9: Ah, new acquisitions! You are a protocol droid, are you not?
C3PO: I am C-3PO, human/cyborg…
EV-9D9: [cuts him off] Yes or no will do.
EV-9D9: Umm… yes.
EV-9D9: How many languages do you speak?
C-3PO: I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, and can readily…
EV-9D9: [cuts him off again] Splendid! We have been without an interpreter since our master got angry with our last protocol droid and disintegrated him.
C-3PO: Disintegrated?
“Well, I speak twenty languages, Jack. Pick one.”
“Power speaks a universal language, eh, cousins?”
“Language is a virus from outer space.”
That capsule’s contents had been well beyond the capability of Haven’s own scientists, and as the capsule itself disintegrated in his digestive tract, submicroscopic virus-based nanotech had infiltrated his bloodstream. They’d traveled to his brain, seeking very specifically targeted sections of it, and then waited.
For this specific moment.
Yves Grosclaude jerked in his seat as the tiny invaders executed their programmed instructions. They did no physical damage at all; they simply invaded his body’s “operating system” and overwrote it with instructions of their own.
He watched helplessly, screaming in the silence of his mind, as his hands switched off the autopilot. They settled on the stick and throttle, and his eyes bulged in silent horror as his right hand wrenched the stick suddenly to the right even as his left rammed the throttle to the wall.
The vehicle was still accelerating when it struck a vertical cliff face head-on at well over eight hundred kilometers per hour.
The Monk reached under his robe and produced a flat sample case. He opened it. It was full of pills. There was a large glass bottle full of a couple of hundred identical pills; and these were small and pink and triangular. But most of the sample case was given over to big, round pills of all colors, individually wrapped and individually labelled in the wandering Monk script.
No two labels were alike. Some of the notations looked hellishly complex.
“These are knowledge,” said the Monk.
“Ah,” I said, and wondered if I was being put on. An alien can have a sense of humor, can’t he? And there’s no way to tell if he’s lying.
“A certain complex organic molecule has much to do with memory,” said the Monk. “Ribonucleic acid. It is present and active in the nervous systems of most organic beings. Wish you to learn my language?”
Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.
“'Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. '”
“Nothing.” Abigail looked skeptical, and Helen chuckled. “All right, I was just thinking about how the first newsy to shove his microphone in Daddy’s face would make out. I’m sure Daddy would be sorry afterwards. He’d probably even insist on paying the medical bills himself.”
Aldrin again tells the man to get away from him.
But it’s when this conspiracy theorist calls him “a coward and a liar” that Col. Aldrin decides it’s time for takeoff.
Within seconds of the insult, Aldrin connects his lunar fist with the man’s face.
The video ends with Aldrin out of frame, but the video’s editor was kind enough to loop the punch several times so we can enjoy viewing the solid punch and hearing what sounds like a boxing glove hitting a heavy bag.
Denying one of America’s greatest achievements is dumb, but messing with an American hero is just flat out stupid. So today we salute you, Colonel Buzz Aldrin. “That was one great punch for man and one badass lesson for mankind … don’t f### with an American hero!”
[spoiler] Oops! My bad! Not really science fiction. 
[\spoiler]
Wise guy huh? If I wasn’t so lazy I’d punch you in the stomach.
“The hinges of the hatch,” he said, “were rotten—eaten away by acid.”
“Acid?” the commander stared at him. “Where would he get acid?”
“From his own digestive processes—regurgitated and spat directly into the hinges. He secreted hydrochloric acid among other things. Not too powerful—but over a period of time—”
His contemptuous words burned like acid, and something happened inside her. Something she’d thought lost forever snapped back into place like the re-socketing of a dislocated limb . . . or the click of a missile tube loading hatch. Her chocolate-dark eyes hardened, and Nimitz reared high on her shoulder.
Listen, you may feel like hell. But, sometimes, lost is where you need to be. Just because you don’t know your direction doesn’t mean you don’t have one.
“Don’t you ever wonder just how much of human knowledge is lost in that . . . black limbo inside the ARM building? Things that could solve problems. Warm the Earth again. Ease us through the lightspeed wall.”
The Crosstime Corporation already held a score of patents on inventions imported from alternate time tracks. Already those inventions had started more than one industrial revolution.
“According to Melissa Mailey, we now live in a world where kings and noblemen rule the roost. And they’ve turned all of central Europe—our home, now, ours and our childrens’ to come—into a raging inferno. We are surrounded by a Ring of Fire. Well, I’ve fought forest fires before. So have lots of other men in this room. The best way to fight a fire is to start a counterfire. So my position is simple. I say we start the American Revolution—a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule!”
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom.