Gregory Benford

That’s how business works. There’s always somebody coming in on your blind side.

Puzzled frowns in the audience. Science reporters they might be, but high school chemistry was going a bit too deep for most.

Thing about crazies is, they’re crazy. You can’t even understand them in retrospect.

Physicists had abandoned God long ago and hoped that firing repeated questions at nature would get to the truth. What scientists really believed in was that the think-check-think-again style of scientific method would yield some species of Truth.

“I’ll be thinking of you as they roll me into a grave marked ‘Nobody Special.’”

“Boy, do I hate these holier-than-thou types.”

“Clerics.”

“Anybody who tries to hem science in, tell it what it can and cannot do. Boundaries are best defined by pushing against them. Expanding our horizons, our sense of wonder.”

She smiled. “There’s nothing holier than wow!?”

There were the usual anxieties, starkly revealing the uneasiness that ordinary intellectuals had with science.

“Sure,” Max said offhand, “there are plenty of archbishops wringing their hands, mumbling philosophers and New Age gab pouring out in the media, but so what?”

She laughed. He said New Age as one word, “newage,” rhyming with “sewage.”

Women lurching around on heels they couldn’t manage (“sexy evening columns” as Frederick’s termed them)—further proof yet again that money can’t buy a clue.

He whispered, “Honey, it’s good ol’ love makes the world go round.”

“Actually, it’s inertia.”

All the astronauts were easy on the eyes. No coincidence. NASA didn’t train people the public wouldn’t want to watch.

Shanna put on the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth and turned up the gain.

Ludwig von Cornball, they had called him back at Moonbase One. Hipitude: post-postmodern irony. All because she played ol’ Ludwig so much—but who was more appropriate? What spirit better expressed the grandeur of an expedition to the edge of the solar system?