Brain Wave

by Poul Anderson

“I’ve been trying to build a phase analyzer for intermolecular resonance bonds in crystal structure,”

saw him as a human being, a living and unique organism, part of an enormous impersonal web which ultimately became the entire universe,

“You know how a neuron works? Like a digital computer. It’s stimulated by a—a stimulus, fires a signal, and is thereafter inactive for a short time. The next neuron in the nerve gets the signal, fires, and is also briefly inactivated. Well, it turns out that everything is screwy today. The inactivation time is a good many microseconds less, the—well, let’s just say the whole system reacts significantly faster than normally. And the signals are also more intense.”

I sometimes think that’s why men fear death—not because of oblivion, but because it’s foredoomed, there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

Don’t ever trade your liberty for another man’s offer to do your thinking and make your mistakes for you.

“No,” said Mandelbaum. “It’s just that there were reasons why it wasn’t—convenient, shall we say?—to call up that division. And ninety-nine per cent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences.

“All I know, all I am, is here, in my head. Everything exists for me only as I know it. And someday I’m going to die.”

He whistled softly, a few notes with a large meaning. Music could be made a language. The whole uprising, throughout the Soviet empire, depended in part on secret languages made up overnight.

“Material artifacts don’t count for much, really. They’re only possible because of a social background of knowledge, tradition, desire—they’re symptoms, not causes.

The cosmos was too big. No matter how swiftly men fled through it, no matter how far they ranged in all ages to come and how mightily they wrought, it would be the briefest glimmer in one forgotten corner of the great silence.

The smooth operation of society required a steady flow of information, a fantastically huge amount to be correlated every day if developments were not to get out of hand. The Observers gathered it in various ways: one of the most effective was simply to wander around in the guise of an ordinary citizen, talking to people and using logic to fill in all the implications.

you have to have motives for doing anything at all.

“We will not be gods, or even guides. But we will—some of us—be givers of opportunity. We will see that evil does not flourish too strongly, and that hope and chance happen when they are most needed, to all those millions of sentient creatures who live and love and fight and laugh and weep and die, just as man once did. No, we will not be embodied Fate; but perhaps we can be Luck. And even, it may be, Love.”