The Midas Plague
Copyright © 1954 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation | |
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The pipeline of production spewed out riches that no king in the time of Malthus could have known. But a pipeline has two ends. The invention and power and labor pouring in at one end must somehow be drained out at the Lucky Morey, blessed economic-consuming unit, drowning in the pipelines flood, striving manfully to eat and drink and wear and wear out his share of the ceaseless tide of wealth. Morey felt far from blessed, for the blessings of the poor are always best appreciated from afar. | |
The feed-back circuits aimed the anti-aircraft guns and, reshaped and newly planned, found a place in a new sort of machinetogether with a miraculous trail of cams and levers, an indestructible and potent power source and a hundred thousand parts and sub-assemblies. And the first robot clanked off the bench. Its mission was its own destruction; but from the scavenged wreck of its pilot body, a hundred better robots drew their inspiration. And the hundred went to work, and hundreds more, until there were millions upon untold millions. And still the riots never happened. For the robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was Plenty. And by the time the gift had shown its own unguessed ills, the time for a Robot Riot was past. Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. | Topic: |
It was worse than a hangover. The name is holdover. Youve had some drinks; youve started to sober up by catching a little sleep. Then you are required to be awake and to function. The consequent state has the worst features of hangover and intoxication; your head thumps and your mouth tastes like the floor of a bear-pit, but you are nowhere near sober. There is one cure. | Topic: |
Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A kind of two-pronged struggle, the struggle of two unwearying runners in an immortal race. There is the refrigerator inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated air that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the refrigerator, the momentary bubble of heated air that defrosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you will. Call the cold Yin. Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang passes Yin. Then Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a hand. If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster. Yin may not lag behind. Then call Yang a robot. And remember that a pipeline has two ends. | |
Exploring the mind, Morey, is like sending scouts through cannibal territory. You cant see the cannibalsuntil its too late. But if you send a scout through the jungle and he doesnt show up on the other side, its a fair assumption that something obstructed his way. In that case, we would label the obstruction cannibals. In the case of the human mind, we label the obstruction a trauma. What the trauma is, or what its effects on behavior will be, we have to find out, once we know that its there. [...] Semmelweiss sighed. The trouble with healing traumas and penetrating psychic blocks and releasing inhibitionsthe trouble with everything we psychiatrists do, in fact, is that we cant afford to do it too well. An inhibited man is under a strain. We try to relieve the strain. But if we succeed completely, leaving him with no inhibitions at all, we have an outlaw, Morey. Inhibitions are often socially necessary. | Topic: |
Right then and there Morey learned the first half of the embezzlers lesson: Anything different is dangerous. | |
My dear man, all creative minds are subversive, whether they operate singly or in such a group as the Brotherhood of Freemen. | Compare to: Topic: |
text checked (see note) Sep 2007 |
The Celebrated No-Hit Inning
Copyright © 1956 by King-Size Publications, Inc. | |
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There is nothing like seeing the same costume on everybody in view to make it seem reasonable and right. Havent the Paris designers been proving that for years? | |
text checked (see note) Sep 2007 |
My Lady Green Sleeves
Copyright © 1956 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation | ||
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IV | Prison rules provided for prisoner trainingit was a matter of rehabilitation. Prisoner rehabilitation is a joke, and a centuries-old one at that: but it had its serious uses, and one of them was to keep the prisoners busy. It didnt much matter at what. | Topic: |
For punishment for a crime is not satisfied by a jail sentencehow does it hurt a man to feed and clothe and house him, with the bills paid by the state? [...] Savage tribes used to lop off a finger or an ear to punish a criminal. Civilized societies confine their amputations to bits and pieces of the personality. Chop-chop, and a mans reputation comes off; chop again, and his professional standing is gone; chop-chop and he has lost the respect and trust of his fellows. The jail itself isnt the punishment. The jail is only the shamans hatchet that performs the amputation. If rehabilitation in a jail workedif it was meant to workit would be the end of jails. | Topic: | |
VIII | Your father and I are perfectly willing to admit that men are equal; but we cant admit that all men are the same. Use your eyes! | |
There was a meetingthis is an old, old story a neighborhood meeting of the leaders of the two biggest womens groups on the block. There were eighteen Irish ladies from the Church Auxiliary and three Jewish ladies from Bnai Brith. The first thing they did was have an election for a temporary chairwoman. Twenty-one votes were cast. Mrs. Grossinger from Bnai Brith got three, and Mrs. OFlaherty from the Auxiliary got eighteen. So when Mrs. Murphy came up to congratulate Mrs. OFlaherty after the election, she whispered, Good for you! But isnt it terrible, the way these Jews stick together? | ||
text checked (see note) Sep 2007 |
The Children of Night
Copyright © 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.
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II | I must say they were a nice family. Ive worked elections before: Connick was a good candidate because he was a good man. The way his kids behaved around him proved it, and the way he behaved around me was the clincher. | |
Anyway, frankly, I think peoples minds are made up, and you cant change them. We dont have to, I said. Dont you know why people vote the way they do, Connick? They dont vote their minds. They vote attitudes and they vote impulses. | Topic: | |
IV | Perfection is so rare that it is interesting to find a case in which one has been perfectly wrong all the way. | |
Think of historys master strokes of flackery: The Jews stabbed Germany in the back! Seventy-eight (or fifty-nine, or one hundred and three) card-carrying Communists in the State Department! I will go to Korea! It is not enough for a theme to be rational; indeed it is wrong for a theme to be rational if you want to move mens glands, because, above all else, it must seem new and fresh and of such revolutionary simplicity that it illuminates an enormous, confused, and disagreeable problem in a fresh and hopeful light. Or so it must seem to the Average Man. And since he has spent any number of surly, worried hours groping for some personal salvation in the face of a bankrupt Germany or a threat of subversion or a war that is going nowhere, no rational solution can ever meet those strictures . . . since he has already considered all the rational solutions and found either that they are useless or that the cost is more than he wants to pay. | Topic: | |
text checked (see note) Nov 2007 |
Earth Eighteen
Copyright © 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.
Note (Hals): end note | |
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2473 km. Houston, although pleasantly located, is not recommended for more than a short visit because of the unpleasant odor of a native hydrocarbon compound. Once used as fuel, oil, as it is called, invades the drinking water, the air, and the conversation of the locals, who firmly believe it will once again have value, and who attempt to trade leases to travelers in exchange for chocolate bars or bits of colored glass. | |
The natives are intelligent, cooperative, and cultured. They are not to be confused with the biped land form with whom they once contended for the domination of the planet. Aquatic but air-breathing, the Terrestrials of Gulfhaven are known locally as dolphins. | Topic: |
Please cooperate with the Park authorities by bagging only the wild humans for table or trophy, as the trained specimens are hard to replace. If you inadvertently take one of them, you must report it at once to the Park Director and pay a fair price per kilogram of dressed weight. | Topic: |
An interesting feature of the Canaveral dialect is their unique numbering system, which goes, Five, four, three, two, one, oh, curse it all! | |
The quaint name of the town comes from the folk belief that at one time this area was inhabited by countless government workers who proliferated until their natural increase came to a halt because of the destruction of their grazing grounds. It was said that they survived by the taking in of one anothers washing [...], hence the description of the place as washing done. | |
5781 km. In Philadelphia an old lamasery contains a cantrip, or Qran, which provides a focus for religious observances by the natives. Copperplate-printed in 1776, it purports to be a declaration of independence, setting forth a program designing to abolish certain iniquities, such as standing armies and a multitude of new offices, and . . . swarms of officers (who) harass our people and eat out their substance. It is interesting, if fruitless, to speculate on the consequences if this program had succeeded. | |
Held to have been the money center of the world, some theories state that with the abolition of money due to the growth of credit cards, its purpose ceased to exist and it was plowed under in a ritual sacrifice to propitiate evil spirits and bring back the good old days. (Cf. the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, etc.) An alternate legend tells of a time of building mighty monoliths in ceremonies known in other primitive communities as potlatching, [...] According to this folk tale, the foundations of the island simply could not support its superstructure, and it turned over and disappeared in the sea. A third legend, that the city was obliterated in a nuclear conflict, has been conclusively disproved by phase-analysis methods based on a study of human psychological traits as reconstructed from surviving documents. Clearly they were crazy, but no race could be that crazy. | |
text checked (see note) Nov 2007 |
Father of the Stars | ||
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II |
But he didnt have time to waste on that particular emotion, or indeed on any emotion at all. He felt time draining away from him and sat up straight again, looking around. At 96, you dare not do anything slowly, not even daydream. | Topics: |
V | Do you know what being a good man means, Ferguson? It means being better than you really areso that even your failures carry someone a little farther to successand thats what he did for us. | |
text checked (see note) Nov 2007 |
The Five Hells of Orion | |
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It felt good in his gauntlets, a rewarding weight; any weapon straightens the back of the man who holds it, and McCray was grateful for this one. With something concrete to do he could postpone questioning. Never mind why he had been brought here; never mind how. Never mind what he would or could do next; all those questions could recede into the background of his mind while he swung the ax and battered his way out [...] | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Nov 2007 |