Charles Sheffield

Could it wipe out life on Earth?"
"Oh, I very much doubt that. Single-celled and oceanic forms will presumably survive. But it might make life impossible for humans."
"Actually, that tends to be my primary concern. Sponges and oysters will have to take care of themselves.

At stake with something more important than sex. At stake was life and death.

War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer.

Many plans featured that old standby, prayer. Its historical record of effectiveness apparently discouraged few people, although I, regrettably, am among the skeptics. All the churches were full. It is not clear to me exactly what prayers were being offered by their occupants. The temporary suspension, perhaps, of the laws of physics? The art galleries and theaters also reported record crowds. If religion is an opiate, art is an anodyne.

An old axiom: when you are totally confused, don’t make things worse by talking.

Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation).

Somehow he felt more resigned than surprised. Things had been going far too well for far too long. Just when you thought you had the universe by the tail, it turned round and bit you on the ass.

I’ll say only this: if we’re going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won’t have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology.

When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep.

His mind was as furiously active as his hormones.

They saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia.

You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.

In any civilized society, it is the individual or group who creates a problem that must have responsibility for solving it.

It’s no surprise that there are people like Anna Griss in the world. There always have been. Go back fifty thousand years, to a time when most of us were just grubbing along, looking for a decent bush of ripe berries or a fresher lump of meat. A few, like McAndrew, were busy inventing language or numbers, or painting the walls of the cave. And some, just a handful but too many in every generation, were seeking an edge over the rest of us: Water access, or mating rules, or restricted entry to heaven. No matter how few they were, Anna Griss would have been one of them.

The Asteroid Belt contains everything from substantial bodies like Ceres, seven hundred and fifty kilometers across, all the way down to house-sized boulders, pebbles, and grains of sand. One good rule of thumb is that for every object of a given size, there will be ten times as many one-third that size.