People From Wisconsin

"“There isn’t any room,” said Joshua. “You travel back along the line of time and you don’t find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn’t be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world.”"

"One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world’s tomorrow, another world’s today. And yesterday is tomorrow, and tomorrow is the past. Except, there wasn’t any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one’s mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted on the wall of time. No film that one could run backwards and see what-once-had-been... One road was open, but another road was closed. Not closed, of course, for it had never been. For there wasn’t any past, there never had been any, there wasn’t room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world."

"Individualists would have little use for a device which would make them understand one another, for they would not care whether they understood one another."

"Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it."

"Bit by bit, as the legend unfolds, the reader gets a more accurate picture of the human race. By degrees, one gains the conviction that here is a race which can be little more than pure fantasy. It is not the kind of race which could rise from humble beginnings to the eminence of culture with which it is gifted in these tales. Its equipment is too poor. So far it lack of stability has become apparent. Its preoccupation with a mechanical civilization rather than with a culture based on some of the sounder, more worthwhile concepts of life indicates a lack of basic character. And now, in this tale, we learn of the limited communications which it possessed, a situation which certainly is not conducive to advancement. Man’s inability to understand and appreciate the thought and the viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome."

"To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known."

"“You sound like a rugged individualist,” said Webster. “You say that like you think it’s funny,” yapped the mayor. “I do think it’s funny,” said Webster. “Funny, and tragic, that anyone should think that way today.” “The world would be a lot better off with some rugged individualism,” snapped the mayor. “Look at the men who have gone places—” “Meaning yourself?” asked Weber. “You might take me, for example,” Carter agreed. “I worked hard. I took advantage of opportunity. I had some foresight. I did—” “You mean you licked the correct boots and stepped in the proper faces,” said Webster. “You’re the shining example of the kind of people the world doesn’t want today. You positively smell musty, your ideas are so old. You’re the last of the politicians, Carter, just as I was the last of the Chamber of Commerce secretaries. Only you don’t know it yet. I did. I got out. Even when it cost me something, I got out, because I had to save my self-respect. Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology. And you haven’t got mob psychology any more. You can’t have mob psychology when people don’t give a damn what happens to a thing that’s dead already—a political system that broke down under its own weight.”"

"These people must be helped to find themselves in this new world, but they must not know that they’re being helped. To let them know would destroy confidence and dignity, and human dignity is the keystone of any civilization."

"Most authorities in economics and sociology regard such an organization as a city an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well. No creature of the highly nervous structure necessary to develop a culture, they point out, would be able to survive within such restricted limits. The result, if it were tried, these authorities say, would lead to mass neuroticism which in a short period of time would destroy the very culture which had built the city."

"These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north."

"Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past."

"“It wouldn’t be the truth,” said Sutton. “That,” said Trevor, “doesn’t have a thing to do with it.”"

"“Propaganda,” Trevor said. “Let’s call it psychology. You say a thing so often and so well that after a time everyone believes it. Even, finally, yourself.”"

"Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth."

"And here and there a human who saw the rightness of the proposition that Man could not, by mere self-assertion, be a special being; understanding that it was to his greater glory to take his place among the other things of life, as a simple thing of life, as a form of life that could lead and teach and be a friend rather than a thing that conquered and ruled and stood as one apart."

"Dreams, she said. Broken dreams are bad enough. But the dream that has no hope...the dream that is doomed long before it’s broken, that’s the worst of all."

"Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again."

"And death was a soft thing, soft and black, cool and sweet and gracious. He slipped into it as a swimmer slips into the surf and it closed over him and held him and he felt the pulse and beat of it and knew the vastness and sureness of it."

"It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move."

"“It’s a wonder to me,” said Adams sourly, “that you don’t simply melt down in the white heat of your brilliance.”"

"I’m just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn’t have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly."

"I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man’s average allotted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next."

"As he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness."

"The chain of life runs smoothly from one generation to the next and none of the links stand out except here and there a link one sees by accident."

"“You do not belong to any bona fide religion that prohibits killing?” “I presume I could classify myself as a Christian,” said Sutton. “I believe there is a Commandment about killing.” The robot shook his head. “It doesn’t count.” “It is clear and specific,” Sutton argued. “It says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” “It is all of that,” the robot told him. “But it has been discredited. You humans discredited it yourselves. You never obeyed it. You either obey a law or you forfeit it. You can’t forget it with one breath and invoke it with the next.”"

"They are worse than the disinherited. They are not the has-beens, they are the never-weres."

"There is mystery here, but a soft, sure mystery that is understood and only remains a mystery because I want it so. The mystery of the nighthawk against a darkening sky, the puzzle of the firefly along the lilac hedge."

"When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose. If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry — yours and mine — back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet. The same thing could be done for the spider that spun his web in the grass, and of the grass in which the web was spun, the bird sitting in the tree and the tree in which he sits, the toad waiting for the fly beneath the bush, and for the fly and bush. We are all genetic brothers. The chain of life, tracing back to that primordial day of life's beginning, is unbroken..."

"I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme — if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one."

"Since the earliest thirties, to read science fiction is to read Simak. A reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all."

"Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land."

"I never heard a bad word about him but only universal approval and approbation... [I have tried to] imitate his easy and uncluttered style. I think I have succeeded to an extent and that it has immeasurably improved my writing. He is the third of three people, then, who formed my writing career. John Campbell and Fred Pohl did it by precept, and Cliff Simak by example."

"Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning."

"An untold time ago, there was a well-founded perception that the human race would end and that something else must take its place. Why must something else take its place? I cannot tell you that. There is no solid rationale for it, but the belief seemed to be that there must be a dominant race upon this planet. Before men were the dinosaurs and before the dinosaurs there were the trilobites..."

"Much of what we see in the universe," said Hugo, "starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it."

"This is the core of the galaxy," Horseface said. "This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything."

"Boone gulped and swallowed. He spoke to The Hat. "You said the Highway to Eternity?" That is not what I said. I said the Highway of Eternity. "Small difference," Boone told him. Not so small as you might think."

"It is a net," said Horseface, "useful for the fishing of the universe." Enid crinkled up her face, staring at what he called a net. It was a flimsy thing and it had no shape. "Certainly," she said, "you would not go fishing the universe in so slight a thing as this." "Time means nothing to it," said Horseface, "nor does space. It is independent of both time and space except as it makes use of them."

"Perversity, she thought. Could that have been what happened to the human race — a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason, have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it, perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one's shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?"

"He stirred again, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not alone. Across the fire from him sat, or seemed to sit, a man wrapped in some all-enveloping covering that might have been a cloak, wearing on his head a conical hat that dropped down so far it hid his face. Beside him sat the wolf — the wolf, for Boone was certain that it was the same wolf with which he'd found himself sitting nose to nose when he had wakened the night before. The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never known that a wolf could smile. He stared at the hat. Who are you? What is this about? He spoke in his mind, talking to himself, not really to the hat. He had not spoken aloud for fear of startling the wolf. The Hat replied. It is about the brotherhood of life. Who I am is of no consequence. I am only here to act as an interpreter. An interpreter for whom? For the wolf and you. But the wolf does not talk. No, he does not talk. But he thinks. He is greatly pleased and puzzled. Puzzled I can understand. But pleased? He feels a sameness with you. He senses something in you that reminds him of himself. He puzzles what you are. In time to come, said Boone, he will be one with us. He will become a dog. If he knew that, said The Hat, it would not impress him. He thinks now to be one with you. An equal. A dog is not your equal..."

"We have time travel," she said, "and none of us, I am sure, really understands it. We stole it from the Infinites. To steal time travel was the one way we could fight back, the one way we could flee. The human race had far space travel before the Infinites showed up. I think it was our far travel that aroused the interest of the Infinites in us. I've often wondered if some of the very primitive principles of time might not have made our many-times-faster-than-light travel possible. Time is somehow tied into space, but I have never known quite how."

"What your friend told you of his seeing of the time wall is true, Henry said in Boone's mind. I know he saw it, although imperfectly. Your friend is most unusual. So far as I know, no other human actually can see it; although there are ways of detecting time. I tried to show him a sniffler. There are a number of snifflers, trying to sniff out the bubble. They know there's something strange, but don't know what it is."

"They changed," said Enid, "from corporeal beings, from biological beings, to incorporeal beings, immaterial, pure intelligences. They now are ranged in huge communities on crystal lattices..."

"We're very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way." "No, I hadn't known," said Boone. "Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it."

"A wrongness persisted, a sense of aberration, some factor not quite right, the feeling of a corner. But Boone could not pin it down; there seemed no way to reach it."

"In the east the moon was rising, a full moon that lighted the landscape so that he could see every little clump of bushes, every grove of trees. And as he stood there, he realized with a sudden start that the moon was full again, that it was always full, it rose with the setting of the sun and set just before the sun came up, and it was always a great pumpkin of a moon, an eternal harvest moon shining on an eternal autumn world. The realization that this was so all at once seemed shocking. How was it that he had never noticed this before? Certainly he had been here long enough, had watched the moon often enough to have noticed it. He had been here long enough — and how long had that been, a few weeks, a few months, a year? He found he did not know. He tried to figure back and there was no way to figure back. There were no temporal landmarks. Nothing ever happened to mark one day from the next. Time flowed so smoothly and so uneventfully that it might as well stand still."

"The old and the young, he thought. The old, who do not care; the young, who do not think."

"First there was space—endless, limitless space, so far from everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not so much from fear or loneliness as from the realization that in this eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an insignificance no yardstick could measure."

"Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without support."

"Perhaps all that had happened had been no more than the working out of human destiny. If the human race could not attain directly the paranormal power he held, this instinct of the mind, then they would gain it indirectly through the agency of one of their creations. Perhaps this, after all, unknown to Man himself, had been the prime purpose of the robots. He turned and walked slowly down the length of village street, his back turned to the ship and the roaring of the captain, walked contentedly into this new world he'd found, into this world that he would make — not for himself, nor for robotic glory, but for a better Mankind and a happier. Less than an hour before he'd congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet. But that was wrong, he told himself. The trap had not been on this world at all, nor any other world. It had been inside himself. He walked serenely down the wagon-rutted track in the soft, golden afternoon of a matchless autumn day, with the dog trotting at his heels. Somewhere, just down the street, the sick baby lay crying in its crib."