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ONCE UPON a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. The first human expedition to Mars was selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man was man himself. At that time, eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on Luna, an interplanetary trip made by humans had to be made in free-fall orbits—from Terra to Mars, two hundred-fifty-eight Terran days, the same for return, plus four hundred fifty-five days waiting at Mars while the planets crawled back into positions for the return orbit.
“Rocket Ship Envoy located. No survivors.” The second was: “Mars is inhabited.” The third: “Correction to despatch 23-105: One survivor of Envoy located.”
Doctor Archer Frame, the interne who had relieved Thaddeus, walked in at that moment. “Good morning,” he said. “How do you feel?” Smith examined the question. The first phrase he recognized as a formal sound, requiring no answer. The second was listed in his mind with several translations. If Doctor Nelson used it, it meant one thing; if Captain van Tromp used it, it was a formal sound.
“Good!” the creature echoed. “Doctor Nelson will be along in a minute. Feel like breakfast?” All symbols were in Smith’s vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not “feel like” food. Nor had he any warning that he might be selected for such honor. He had not known that the food supply was such that it was necessary to reduce the corporate group. He was filled with mild regret, since there was still so much to grok of new events, but no reluctance.
GILLIAN BOARDMAN was a competent nurse and her hobby was men.
She was balked but not beaten, as suite K-12 had a door joining it to the room beyond, a room used as a sitting room when the suite was occupied by a high official.
Someone needs to fire security.
They were all amazingly beautiful; they were also amazingly good secretaries. In Harshaw’s opinion the principle of least action required that utility and beauty be combined.
He claimed that his method of writing was to hook his gonads in parallel with his thalamus and disconnect his cerebrum; his habits lent credibility to the theory.
My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it.
There was no parallel between human and Martian psychological foundations. Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.
Unexpected discorporation was rare on Mars; Martian taste in such matters called for life to be a rounded whole, with physical death at the appropriate selected instant. This artist, however, had become so preoccupied that he forgot to come in out of the cold; when his absence was noticed his body was hardly fit to eat. He had not noticed his discorporation and had gone on composing his sequence.
The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed.
Harshaw had the arrogant humility of a man who has learned so much that he is aware of his own ignorance; he saw no point in “measurements” when he did not know what he was measuring.
But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it “good.”
The Japanese have five ways to say ‘thank you’—and every one translates as resentment, in various degrees.
Though I’ve never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
Your mother didn’t have to say, ‘Mustn’t eat your playmates, dear; that’s not nice,’ because you soaked it up from our culture—and so did I. Jokes about cannibals and missionaries, cartoons, fairy tales, horror stories, endless things. Shucks, son, it couldn’t be instinct; cannibalism is historically a most widespread custom in every branch of the human race. Your ancestors, my ancestors, everybody.”
Harshaw recalled the tragedy that relativity had been for many scientists. Unable to digest it, they had taken refuge in anger at Einstein. Their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was die and let younger minds take over.
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself.
A desire not to butt into other people’s business is eighty percent of all human wisdom.”
“I have been thinking about it. Jubal, there’s something about Mike that makes you want to care of him.” “I know. You’ve probably never encountered honesty before. Innocence. Mike has never tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil . . . so we don’t understand what makes him tick. Well, I hope you never regret it.”
a man who marries a nurse must accept the fact that nurses feel maternal toward their charges—accept it and like it, for if Gillian had not had the character that made her a nurse, he would not love her.
I did it because she was my guest and I stood in loco parentis.
in the parents ' place. Latin.
“Says the infallible Jubal Harshaw, speaking ex cathedra from his belly button.
ex cathedra is from the chair. Presumably, the Pope's chair.
“Jubal, are you saying I ought not to criticize the administration?” “Nope. Gadflies are necessary. But it’s well to look at the new rascals before you turn your present rascals out. Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents—a low level, but what can you expect?
Then look at the man who will replace him if his government topples.” “There’s little difference.” “There’s always a difference! This is between ‘bad’ and ‘worse’—which is much sharper than between ‘good’ and ‘better.’ ”
The first principle in riding a tiger is to hang on tight to its ears.”
“Quit being obtuse and listen. Mike has the misfortune to be heir to more wealth than Croesus dreamed of . . . plus a claim to political power under a politico-judicial precedent unparalleled in jug-headedness since Secretary Fall was convicted of receiving a bribe that Doheny was acquitted of paying.
“Wait a minute, Jubal. Even animals have property. And the Martians aren’t animals; they’re a civilization, with cities and all sorts of things.” “Yes. ‘Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests.’ Nobody understands ‘meus-et-tuus’ better than a watch dog.
Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness but Mike’s faith in his ‘Old Ones’ is no more irrational than a conviction that the dynamics of the universe can be set aside through prayers for rain.”
We find you’ve turned it into a circus. Well, if you’re going to have a circus, you’ve got to have elephants.
“Good. Dr. Mahmoud, do you know of any other brothers of our young brother who are likely to show up?” “No. Not from the Champion, there are no more.” Mahmoud decided not to ask the complementary question, as it would hint at how disconcerted he had been—at first—to discover his own conjugational commitments. “I’ll tell Sven and the Old Man.”
“in any verbalizing race. A verbalizing race has words for every concept and creates new ones or new definitions whenever a new concept evolves. A nervous system able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing. If the Martians know what ‘war’ is, they have a word for it.”
“She Who Used to Be the Beautiful Heaulmière,”
“Oh, dear! I thought we had him safe at last.” “There is no safety this side of the grave.”
Facing them about twenty feet away, seated in a chair remarkably like a throne, was an old man. He looked as if he were alive . . . and he reminded Jill of an old goat on the farm where she had spent childhood summers—out-thrust lower lip, the whiskers, the fierce, brooding eyes. Jill felt her skin prickle; Archangel Foster made her uneasy. Mike said in Martian, “My brother, this is an Old One?” “I don’t know, Mike. They say he is.” He answered, “I do not grok an Old one.” “I don’t know, I tell you.” “I grok wrongness.”
‘Love’ is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
