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They would laugh at earth men, to whom time was a one-way street with a dead end in sight.
“Boyle, I’ve got proof that the old man’s life really did pass before his eyes. He traveled back in time to 1893!” “He should have shot your grandfather while he was back there. Maybe I’d have a minute’s peace now to finish this paper.”
They had four children to save the marriage for. What the marriage had done for the children so far was to make them the gift of life, and then teach them how to be vain, querulous, and full of hell.
About 20 years ago I wrote an essay that was printed by The New York Times about how inhospitable the moons and asteroids and other planets in the solar system were, so that we would be wise to quit treating this planet as though, in case we wrecked it, there were plenty of spares out there.
They honestly believed, as nearly as I could tell, that, if it weren’t for Columbus, we Europeans still wouldn’t know about the Western Hemisphere, and General Motors wouldn’t now be laying off 70,000 workers, and Los Angeles wouldn’t be running out of water, and we wouldn’t have killed a high-school teacher while trying to put her into orbit, and so on.
Yes, and Heinrich Himmler, a German chicken farmer Adolf Hitler put in charge of killing Jews and Slavs and homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Gypsies and so on in industrial quantities, once delivered a touching speech to his underlings, who were doing the tormenting and killing day after day, in which he praised them for sacrificing their humane impulses in order to achieve a greater good.
When I consider the ghastly orders obeyed by underlings of Columbus, or of Aztec priests supervising human sacrifices, or of senile Chinese bureaucrats wishing to silence unarmed, peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square only three years ago as I write, I have to wonder if obedience isn’t the basic flaw in most of humankind.
rockets. I answered without hesitation that American soldiers could not be found who would do a thing that heartless. Wrong again.
We are all so often bad news for somebody else.
But when I ask myself now of what that grandeur could possibly consist, I can come up with only one answer: The millions and millions of us who, in spite of all the atrocities, are still OK.
Your disgust is so profound that you simply let the pen and petition fall to the floor. You walk away, mount the stairs to the first-floor hallway, go down the hallway to Mr. Caslow’s office. You understand now that the ex-prisoners of war, the ex-robots, are begging to be used as robots again.
