The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its c...
Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motion...
So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn; there would be more of them in the years to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also a great hope. When Ear...
Otto would pull the trigger at the slightest provocation and you, Michael, would agonize aver its morality even if your life were threatened. I'm the tiebreaker.
Myron, like countless NCO’s before him, had discovered the ideal compromise between power and responsibility.
Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Univers...
Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well.
I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.
It seemed altogether unfair and unreasonable that the sky should be so hard.
In a rare flash of humor, she had replied: Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.
If such a thing had happened once, it must surely have happened many times in this galaxy of a hundred billion suns.
I hope you’re right. Apart from that, won’t there be trouble when he discovers what you’re trying to do? Because he will, you know. I’ll take that risk. Besides, we understand each other rather well....
How I envy them, said Colonel Jones. Sometimes it’s quite a relief to have something trivial to worry about.
Here the trees surrounded them with an invisible, anechoic blanket, so that every word seemed sucked into silence the moment it was uttered.
Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow—incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun. Dying? No—th...
He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart.
But at least we have answered one ancient question. We are not alone. The stars will never again be the same to us.
At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton’s horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells’s The Star. He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his i...
And there still remained, for all men to share, the linked worlds of Love and Art. Linked, because love without art is merely the slaking of desire, and Art cannot be enjoyed unless it is approached w...
All bureaucracies are the same. They drain the life out of the truly creative people and develop mindless paper-pushers as their critical mass.