Pray overconfident compete
They called his name, Jim said. Now he has to go through the fire to claim it. Now he has to break Dark Robadurs most holyThou shalt not.” pray overconfident compete The blocks, you see . . . Bah! Quincannon thought. Attempted murder was more like it. Even the strongest cable could not withstand the blade of an ax. Those hollow chunkings hed heard earlier had been ax blows. Only one man in Kennett’s Crossing was capable of rowing a skiff over to the spit anchor and chopping most of the way through the cable, leaving just enough for the scow to be winched out into midstream before it snapped — Gus Burgade. And there could be just one primary target for such cold-blooded perfidy — John Quincannon. "No." The other half of the storys genesis was some remarks In Loren Eiseley’s essay, The Fire Apes,’ with which I didn’t entirely agree.... "They can. Im sure they can." That conversation had reached into the past. Gauck, Gausgofer, bloodless eyes and the black eyes-they remained. Dont. Never had a call for it. All these factors, then, must be considered in weighing the (merely) very good stories against each other—and against the inclusion of two (or more) selections by a single author from the smaller group of outstanding stories. Ordinarily, they operate in favor of variety. This time— Because the academicians, politicians, and spokesmen in general always learn more slowly (being already so stuffed with knowledge), it may seem that this kind ofs-f thinking is making slow headway; but watch the cartoons in your newspaper or weekly magazine—listen to the new gags— check the number of fantasy or s-f themes in TV shows—in pop songs— The tubby little man had nothing to say, other than an incoherent sputter. A trapped look had come into his eyes as if he might be about to do something foolish and cowardly— bolt and run or perhaps crawl under the worktable and curl into a fetal position. He did neither. Instead he sank bonelessly onto his chair, covered his face with his hands. I keep thinking there must be some place for me somewhere. I keep thinking of some kind of gelatin land, some puddingly spot all viscous, muculent, where the air is thick and wet as water. I wouldnt even ask to be able to fly around in it. Id be happy just to ooze along the bottom as long as it was nothing like floors or mattresses or pillows. But the way it is around here you can get pretty bored with gravity. In the tenth Annual, I quoted (from Russell Bakers column) some mood-filled poetry emanating from a computer in Florida. Some years earlier I had heard from John Pierce (who as J. R. Pierce is Director of Research at the Bell Labs in New Jersey; and as J. J. Coupling has been absent much loo long from the pages of the s-f magazines), about computer-composed music—and last year, of course, everyone was hearing about it. Now, from Pierce again, but this time through the pages of Playboy (June, 1965) comes word of computer art. And not just words, but pictures—one in particular.* * * * The young man was silent. You wish something, Amity-san? The cyclone was twisting around those eyes, its still center. Her head was thrown back, but I knew there was no ceiling between her gaze, passive as Buddhas, and the unchanging skies. Only the two moons, perhaps, interrupted their slumber in that elemental Nirvana of uninhabited turquoise. But someone boarded— a lone male. After which the gangplank was quickly raised and theCaptain Weber swung out again into the channel. We will have to judge from a great distance whether a planet is too far out or too near its sun. A planet as close to the sun as we are should revolve at a good pace on its axis in a time corresponding to our 24-hour day. A planet turning more slowly would have higher temperatures dangerous to budding life forms. Also the cosmic rays that penetrate its atmospheric shell should not be too strong or too weak. If too strong, annihilation of life would follow. If too weak, the chemistry of the world would not be encouraged to put forth those remembrance-molecules we call life. It was a marvel that she had begun to feel the same. And she must have, else she wouldnt have finally relented and permitted him to squire her about on an increasingly frequent basis. Squiring was all she’d permitted thus far, but that was fine with him. For the nonce, anyway. The greater intimacy he craved was only partly sexual now. His longing went deeper than that, perhaps as deep as a proposal of marriage. But her late husband had been the love of her life, and she had been faithful to his memory in the years since his death. What if she had no interest in marrying again and were to say no to the proposal? What would he do then? A special feature of your enterprising annual anthologists the self-help do-it-yourself diagnostic puzzle, as provided in all the best general magazines..
