This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. — Kurt Vonnegut

Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science.

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.