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“Fungi have as much right to life as I do. They know what they want, Bill. Damned if I do anymore.”
Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing.
The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.
“Where am I?” said Dwayne.
To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.
It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.
He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn’t want it anyway.
It awaited anybody. It awaited Dwayne.
The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
“I won’t know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not,” said Trout. “It’s dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s serious, too.”
“For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved!”
“Takes all kinds of people to make up a world,” said Trout.
Roses are red, And ready for plucking. You’re sixteen, And ready for high school.
Search
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.
“We call it The Hundred-Nigger Machine,”
Another animal invented by the Creator of the Universe was a Mexican beetle which could make a blank-cartridge gun out of its rear end. It could detonate its own farts and knock over other bugs with shock waves.
“I saw that sign,” said Dwayne, “and I couldn’t help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for—to find out how much a man could take without breaking.”
“I will,” said Dwayne. This was a bad mistake.
And then the pioneering began.
“Mr. Secretary-General, it is the past which scares the bejesus out of me.”
There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.
Word of honor: I am better now.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
“Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?” she asked me. “The big show is inside my head,” I said.
The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in case they were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed up this symbol of their secret lives:
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
“You are pooped and demoralized,” read Dwayne. “Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”
He was a fisherman for men’s souls.
I saw Kazak out of the corner of my right eye. His eyes were pinwheels. His teeth were white daggers. His slobber was cyanide. His blood was nitroglycerine.
