Jack Williamson

Two weeks passed, by the time of the ship—physiological time, that measured by heartbeats and all bodily rhythms, in which the span of life moved relentlessly toward its end, regardless of motion backward or forward along the time dimension.

Human knowledge is never entirely consistent or complete, because the human brain is only a crude and transient mass of watery cells, error-prone and glacier-slow.

“What’s wrong with him, Matal?” Wendre said dazedly. “He wants to kill us all.”
“Power,” Wu said somberly, stepping back from the car, “is a vision that drives men mad.”

Quietly she said: “I know I’m not insane.”
So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics.

Power is habit-forming. We grew addicted to it. Few things survive the centuries’ slow decay: senses grow dull; passions grow weak; and ideals die. Only the taste for power lives on as an excuse for survival.

Human belief is seldom related to truth.

He certainly didn’t feel insane, he reflected—but then did any lunatic, ever?

“I wonder—?” whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. “I wonder what they really found?”
“Whatever it is,” breathed Barbee, “the find doesn’t seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell.”
“No,” the girl said, “men aren’t that much afraid of hell.”

“I don’t see the necessity of this mummery—”
“Necessity?” Wu said. “Free will is a necessity. And the illusion is more important than the reality.”

The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied.
Life holds no kindness for such a man. Any defeat short of death is only a spur; success is empty.
With cold self-analysis, Horn recognized this fact, accepted it, and went on unchanged.

The mystery of it gets me. The builders of the trilithons and the road were high-tech wizards, but their skills didn’t save them. I’ve been wondering how they died. Maybe they got too good at the science of war.

“I’m not a religious man, Mr. Barbee—I reject the supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell.”
The dark man smiled.
“For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It’s my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem.”

The vampire legend, he might conclude, has served conveniently for many thousand years as a conventional folk expression of unconscious feelings of aggression and guilt.

Yet there was a pattern, and the fact that Horn could find it was a commentary upon empire. Mass government is government by rule and regulation. Obedience and conformity are overriding virtues; initiative is punished more often than rewarded. There are prescribed procedures for conducting a search, and no man can be punished for choosing rules over reality.

Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion.