Berserker's Planet Quotes

“Gus, help me! Help! Oh, God, no no nooo!” So screamed the female upon at last fully perceiving the stained altar just before her, and evidently realizing its purpose, just at the moment when the two priests who were not playing instruments came to tear away her garlands and clothes and chain her down upon the stones. The berserker watched steadily to see whether Gus or God (whatever entities these might be) might come to the female’s aid, although from its experience following 17,261 similar appeals the probability seemed vanishingly small.”
― Fred Saberhagen, Berserker's Planet

“How to convey, to someone who had never seen even depictions on film or holograph, the centuries of mass destruction berserkers had visited upon the galaxy, the documented cases of individual horrors? Whole planets had been sterilized, whole solar systems laid waste by the unliving enemy. People by the thousands or tens of thousands had perished in berserkers’ experiments aimed at discovering what made the strange two-legged Earth- descended blobs of protoplasm so resistant to the fundamental truth-assumption of the berserkers’ programming: that life was a disease of matter that had to be expunged.”
― Fred Saberhagen, Berserker's Planet