The Spheres of Heaven

Data are not the same as information. Before you can get the answers you want, you have to ask the right question.

“Any other instructions?”

“Not without breaking one of my own golden rules. In an unpredictable situation, the man or woman on the spot should make the decisions, not the general sitting on his ass a million miles away from the action.”

Only the final choice would require a human decision: enter the Link, or decline to do so? It occurred to Chan that perhaps this was the choice that humans were least qualified to make. He recognized in himself the tendency to say, we’ve come so far, we can’t possibly change our minds now. People following that philosophy died climbing mountains, they signed disastrous contracts, they flew into hurricanes, and they embarked on lifelong commitments to the wrong mates. Perhaps they headed to the stars for the same reason.

It was the classic question; you had two tasks to perform and one promised to be much harder and more unpleasant than the other. Did you tackle the tough one first and get it out of the way? Or did you postpone, and hope that before you came to the hard part you might be struck by a meteorite, or that a solar flare would wipe out life in the solar system?

I learned a long time ago that it’s a bad habit to waste effort counting your friends. It’s your enemies you need to look out for.

Korin stared. It must be a novelty, finding someone more paranoid than he was.

I’ll say only this: if we’re going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won’t have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology.

He had written the man off completely, and now here came common sense and a talent for improvisation. Maybe you didn’t have to be an idiot just because you were rich.

It was improbable for him to meet his old friends here? Fine, so it was improbable; but it had happened. “Improbable” was something you could only apply to future events.

Violence is never the only solution.

Never get involved in a venture with a man who inherited his money and didn’t earn any himself. He’ll assume he’s smarter than you are, just because he’s rich and you’re not, and he’ll expect you to bow down to his greatness because for all his life people have.

It had been designed for “peacekeeping,” which meant that it had been fitted out from stem to stern with the most hideous weapons of war that the human mind could conceive.