Time and Again

Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth.

Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.

“It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton.

“That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”

“Propaganda,” Trevor said. “Let’s call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself.”

And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart.

“It’s a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, “that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.”

And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it.

As he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.

“You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?”

“I presume I could classify myself as a Christian,” said Sutton. “I believe there is a Commandment about killing.”

The robot shook his head. “It doesn’t count.”

“It is clear and specific,” Sutton argued. “It says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

“It is all of that,” the robot told him. “But it has been discredited. You humans discredited it yourselves. You never obeyed it. You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.”

The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident.

I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.

I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.

Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope...the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all.

There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge.