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‘I was just following orders’ was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact … but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?
Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.
Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.
Interesting explanation of how their near-light-speed space travel works.
I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our friends’ lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.
Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.
In a book that is mostly humorless, these bits are nice.
‘Folk hero.’ I sipped at the beer. ‘Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?’ ‘John Wayne?’ He shook his head. ‘I never went in the can, you know. I’m no expert at military history.’ ‘Forget it.’
Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it’s easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about two one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You’re a civilian.
This book is bleak. Take "Old Man's War" and strip almost all the humor from it and this is what you might get...
From inside your suit, you could see your surroundings in ghostly monochrome — which phenomenon was glibly explained to me as being due to ‘phase transference of quasi-energy leaking through from an adjacent tachyon reality,’ so much phlogiston to me.
I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals.
