Harry Turtledove

Had optimism run that far ahead of common sense?

Spend all your time thinkin’ ’bout tomorrow, you ain’t gonna live to git there.

Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.

Was that savage cynicism or sage common sense? When it came to gauging the chances of peace and war, how much difference was there?

Down underneath, there wasn’t much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways.

What did he do for fun? Anything? Poor bastard, Sam thought. Zwilling probably got his kicks telling other people what to do. If that wasn’t a dead-end street, Sam had never seen one.

Somewhere between half a mile and a quarter of a mile from what the officers were calling ground zero, there was no sidewalk or even rubble under foot. Everything has been fused to what looked like rough, crude glass. It felt like hard, unyielding glass under Flora’s feet, too.

“My God,” she said over and over. She wasn’t the only one, either. She watched a Catholic Congressman cross himself, and another take out a rosary and move his lips in prayer. When you saw something like this, what could you do but pray? But wasn’t a God Who allowed such things deaf to mere blandishments?

The roll of the dice, the turn of the card…Some guys had a shell burst ten feet away from them and didn’t get badly hurt. Some turned into hamburger. Who could say why? God, maybe. From everything Jorge had seen, He had a rugged sense of humor.

Potter knew perfectly well that it was true. He also knew that what was true and what made good propaganda often had not even a nodding acquaintance with each other.

A rocket can’t be that accurate…can it? But that’s only a wild-ass guess—excuse the technical term.

“Half of being smart is knowing what you’re not smart at,” Jake said. “Plenty of folks reckon that ’cause they know something, they know everything. And that ain’t the way it works.”

“I never said it was,” Goldman answered primly.

“Yeah, I know,” Jake said. “You make one.”

“We sure is crazy,” someone would say. “If you ain’t crazy in dis here place, you gots to be nuts.”