Honor Harrington watched him over the sights of her pistol. She saw the hate on his face, the terrible realization of what had happened, the venomous determination as his pistol wavered up centimeter by agonized centimeter. It was coming up, rising toward firing position while he snarled at her, and there was no emotion at all in her brown eyes as her fifth bullet smashed squarely through the bridge of his nose.
It was self-defense, Mom.
Zapp : My God, we’re defenseless… like fish in a barrel!
Richard Nixon’s head : Options?
Zapp : My instinct is to hide in this barrel like the wily fish.
Which one of you disrespectful men been tossing his dirty drawers in the kitchen trash can, huh? From now, I want my kitchen clean, all right? Germ free!
If he could not clean up this mess by the end of the weekend, it could blow up in his face. His experiments would never reach completion.
"Scientists are cleaning up our property for nothing.”
“Scientists my eye!” Janie retorted. “They don’t know any more about the stuff than I do.”
…and the Captain left me in charge. Before any of you unwisely take this as a clue to step further out of line than you were already planning to, I’d like to say two words about my position as the company’s munitions commander and resident mad scientist: “guinea pigs”.
The mechanic had laid out two suits of their Martian-made light combat armour, a number of rifles and shotguns, and stacks of ammunition and explosives.
“What,” Holden said, “is all this?”
I took her in my arms and kissed her.
And thus in the midst of a city of wild conflict, filled with the alarms of war; with death and destruction reaping their terrible harvest around her, did Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, true daughter of Mars, the God of War, promise herself in marriage to John Carter, Gentleman of Virginia.
The fact that someone had decided I’d be safer on Mars, where you could still only SORT OF breathe the air and SORT OF not get sunburned to death, was a sign that the war with the aliens was not going fantastically well.
Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares.
“Air you can breathe!” he exulted. “It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!” He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port. The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer, Leroy, the biologist, and Harrison, the astronomer and captain of the expedition.
Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the Ares expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars.
“I’m getting pretty good at this. Maybe when all this is over I could be a product tester for Mars rovers.”
Mars. I can’t believe I’m back on Mars. Three times before this place almost killed me. I swore I’d never give it another chance to finish the job.
You won’t believe it. We’ve checked and double-checked. It keeps coming up the same thing. Colonel, the message is: Mars. Needs. Women.
I know, Flora, but this is it, if you’re available. Because guess what! I’m in Marsport without Hilda.
On Mars there is never anything to laugh at. All the things that are funny to us humans either cannot happen on Mars or are not permitted to happen—sweetheart, what you call ‘freedom’ doesn’t exist on Mars; everything is planned by the Old Ones.
“The gift of humor is gone,” said Trask drearily. “No man will ever laugh again.”
The audience howled with laughter. Asher laughed, too, looking sheepish but pleased at the special attention.
The shift workers howled and laughed and were pelted, and broke ranks, and the jelly beans managed to work their way into the mechanism of the slidewalks after which there was a hideous scraping as the sound of a million fingernails rasped down a quarter of a million blackboards, followed by a coughing and a sputtering, and then the slidewalks all stopped and everyone was dumped thisaway and thataway in a jackstraw tumble, and still laughing and popping little jelly bean eggs of childish color into their mouths. It was a holiday, and a jollity, an absolute insanity, a giggle. But . …
The shift was delayed seven minutes.
They did not get home for seven minutes.
The master schedule was thrown off by seven minutes.
“Would you like a jelly baby?”
“So it’s true! You do eat babies!”