More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Gray and bony, well over six feet tall, with swinging arms and a peculiarly rapid gait.
And his face. It had a ravaged quality, eaten away; as if, Barney conjectured, the fat-layer had been consumed, as if Eldritch at some time or other had fed off himself, devoured perhaps with gusto the superfluous portions of his own body. He had enormous steel teeth, these having been installed prior to his trip to Prox by Czech dental surgeons; they were welded to his jaws, were permanent: he would die with them. And—his right arm was artificial. Twenty years ago in a hunting accident on Callisto he had lost the original; this one of course was superior in that it provided a specialized
...more
“It’s not that you’re so inadequate,” he said. “It’s just that I have high standards.” I was taught to expect a lot from others, he said to himself. To expect they’d be as reputable and stable as I am, and not sloppily emotional all the time, not in control of themselves.
What was the use? Emily couldn’t be reformed; she was purely and simply a slob. Her idea of a well-spent day was to wallow and putter and fool with a mess of greasy, excretionlike paints or bury her arms for hours on end in a great crock of wet gray clay.
I’ll never be the New York Pre-Fash consultant, he said to himself. I’ll always be stuck here in Detroit where nothing, absolutely nothing new originates.
it all had a mysterious quality to it, as if it had all somehow happened before but in another way.
He glanced at Emily, then. “You’re a duty type. You feel it’s the moral thing to do at this point, to suppress your emotions toward Barney; it’s what you’ve been doing all along anyhow. But forget your duty. You can’t build a marriage on it; there has to be spontaneity there.
you should face your feelings honestly and not cover them with a self-sacrificing façade.
“You make me so damn angry,” she said to her husband. “I said how I feel and I’m not a hypocrite. And I don’t like to be accused of being one.”
The man’s a protoplasm, spreading and reproducing and dividing, and all through that damn lichen-derived non-Terran drug, that horrible, miserable Chew-Z.
which of us gets melted down for Palmer to guzzle? Because that’s what we are potentially for him: food to be consumed.
Leo Bulero leaned back in his chair, lit a large green Havana-leaf claro cigar which had been housed in a helium-filled humidor, probably for years . . . the cigar, as he bit the end off, seemed dry and brittle; it cracked under the pressure of his teeth and he felt disappointment. It had appeared so good, so perfectly preserved in its coffin. Well, you never know, he informed himself.
“I have nothing to gain, nothing at all, from this time period. I want my wife back. I want Emily.” He felt enraged, upsurging bitterness. The bile of disappointment.
The six Palmer Eldritches gestured contemptuously. “You’re a phantasm, as Leo said; I can see through you, literally. I’ll tell you in more accurate terminology what you are.” From the six the calm, dispassionate statement came, then. “You’re a ghost.”
The Eldritches added, “I’m inclined, as you can see, to be somewhat sympathetic to the Early- and Neo-Christian point of view, such as Anne holds. It assists in explaining a great deal.”
He felt utterly defeated; he had been abandoned even by himself, the ultimate, he thought with impotent, wild fury. Christ!
Mounted on the wall of the office gleamed a plaque; it was an award which Emily had received, three years before his own time, for ceramics she had entered in a show. Here it was; he still kept it. “I want to be that plaque,” Barney decided. It was made of hardwood, probably mahogany, and brass; it would endure a long time and in addition he knew that his future self would never abandon it. He walked toward the plaque, wondering how he ceased being a man and became an object of brass and wood mounted on an office wall.
“Okay! I’ll make you a stone, put you by a seashore; you can lie there and listen to the waves for a couple of million years. That ought to satisfy you.”
That’s my gift to you, and remember: in German Gift means poison.
“There was a creepy presence though, where I was; it sort of marred things.”
Something which stands with empty, open hands is not God. It’s a creature fashioned by something higher than itself, as we were; God wasn’t fashioned and He isn’t puzzled.”
“Never grovel. God, or whatever superior being it is we’ve encountered—it wouldn’t want that and even if it did you shouldn’t do it.”
“It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.” In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called—stigmata.
“Why aren’t you what you seem? You’re not like that now. I don’t understand.”
“It’s a price,” Anne decided. “That we must pay. For our desire to undergo that drug experience with that Chew-Z. Like the apple originally.” Her tone was shockingly bitter.
Does that make it evil? he wondered. Do I believe the argument I gave Norm Schein? Well, it certainly makes it inferior to what came two thousand years before. It seems to be nothing more or less than the desire of, as Anne puts it, an out-of-dust created organism to perpetuate itself;
“To the primitive mind,” Eldritch said, “the unclean and the holy are confused.
I saw enough in the future not to ever give up, even if I’m the only one who doesn’t succumb, who’s still keeping the old way alive, the pre-Palmer Eldritch way.
It’s nothing more than faith in powers implanted in me from the start which I can—in the end—draw on and beat him with. So in a sense it isn’t me; it’s something in me that even that thing Palmer Eldritch can’t reach and consume because since it’s not me it’s not mine to lose.
