Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?
This was the fundamental problem with rockets—and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necess...
They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of a...
The room you are about to enter, the Eagle said, setting up Nicole’s wheelchair, is the largest single room in this domain. It is half a kilometer across at its widest point. Inside currently is a mod...
Suppose, in their altruistic passion for justice and order, they had determined to reform the world, but had not realized that they were destroying the soul of man?
Like every human being, Alvin was in some measure a machine, his actions predetermined by his inheritance. That did not alter his need for understanding and sympathy, nor did it render him immune to l...
I’m only an ex-astronomer; it’s years since I did any real research. Now I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.
It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.
It is not easy to run a shipping line between destinations that not only change their positions by millions of kilometers every few days, but also swing through a velocity range of tens of kilometers...
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth: learning and loving. Nothing else—not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake—can possibly have the same lasting value.
In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when y...
In Lys, it seemed, all love began with mental contact, and it might be months or years before a couple actually met. In this way, Hilvar explained, there could be no false impressions, no deceptions,...
His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People—particularly older ones—still spoke of putting film into a camera, or gas into a car. Even the phrase cutting a tape was still sometimes heard in reco...
He wanted to close his eyes and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him, but that was an act of a coward and he would not yield to it.
He had already decided that X rays, sonic probes, neutron beams, and all other nondestructive means of investigation would be brought into play before he called up the heavy artillery of the laser. It...
He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
For Jan was still suffering from the romantic illusion–the cause of so much misery and so much poetry–that every man has only one real love in his life.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications.
Even the few serious crimes that did occur received no particular attention in the news. For well-bred people do not, after all, care to read about the social gaffes of others.
Enjoy them while you may, answered Rashaverak gently. They will not be yours for long. It was advice that might have been given to any parent in any age: but now it contained a threat and a terror it...