Millennium

By then I was sure the universe could no longer surprise me, nor interest me. I was wrong. It managed to do both in no more than ten minutes.

I hate inefficiency. You’d have to look a long long ways before you found a better example of it than the press conference.

“You see…when you get right down to it, I don’t believe you have my daughter. I won’t until I see her. And having seen her, I won’t believe I could lose her again.”

Sherman looked at him for a long time.

“The universe is, so far as I know, Doctor Mayer, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve.”

I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told.

I sit here now with two stories, about to add lies, half-truths, or simple misunderstandings of my own, moved by some vague urge toward a completeness of things—a completion that can never be achieved.

Predestination is the ugliest word in any human language.

You can define heroism any way you want to, but that’s it for me. It’s sticking in there no matter what. Whether it’s a pilot fighting his plane down through that last mile, or switchboard operators and doctors and nurses staying at their posts while the bombs blitz London, or even the dance band on the Titanic playing while the ship goes down…

It’s fulfilling your responsibilities.

Me, I don’t know if I was born a pessimist or had pessimism thrust upon me. What I do you know is that I’ve had ample reason to embrace the philosophy.

“Don’t be such a pessimist.”

“All time travelers are pessimists.”

We were in the middle of a festival known as Christmas, which seem to take up the whole month of December. There was a big tree decorated with lights, and various other decorations hung around the buildings. Christmas was a time for spending money, traveling, and getting drunk. It had originally been a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, but by the 1980s that had been largely forgotten, replaced by a new totem in a red suit and a false beard.

We speak of the rigid framework of events, but the fact is there is some leeway. Apparently things tend to happen the way they should happen, according to whatever plan was dictated by whoever’s in charge of this stinking universe. Changes, if they are minor, correct themselves in ways no one understands but which tend to make a hash of anybody’s theory of free will.

Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it.

I sat on the bed and read the Gideon Bible until the food came. That Gideon sure had a weird sense of humor. Try “The Book of Genesis.”

Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They’re just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.

News is, by definition, bad news.

The nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement.

Sherman looked surprised as an infallible Pope holding a losing ticket at the racetrack.

I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks.

There’s always a way to work out your problems if you’re only take a look at them and then do what needs to be done.

For instance, when I found that three mornings in a row I had shut off my new alarm and gone back to sleep, I put the switch in the kitchen and tied it in to the coffee-maker. When you’re up and have the coffee perking, it’s too late to go back to sleep.

Time travel is so dangerous it makes H-bombs seem like perfectly safe gifts for children and imbeciles. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen with a nuclear weapon? A few million people die: trivial. With time travel we can destroy the whole universe, or so the theory goes. No one has been anxious to test it.

The parking lot was full of cars belonging to relatives, and one news truck from a local television station.

“Easy, Bill,” Tom said, and guided me gently away from the camera crew. “You don’t want to wind up on the six o’clock news. Not that way.”

“I hope there’s a hell, Tom. And when those guys get there, I hope the devil’s waiting to shove a camera in their faces and ask them what they feel like.”