Lucifer's Hammer

The value of a thing is what that thing will bring. -Legal Maxim

Hopeless causes are the only ones worth fighting for. The fight for the taxpayer is the most hopeless of them all.

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. - Robert A. Heinlein

Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes.

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.

work, whatever it must be, is the service of God and of the community and therefore the expression of man's dignity. - Emil Brunner, Gifford Lectures, 1948

Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?" Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. "They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth—" "They tell us we're finished," Sharps broke in. "And that's stupid. We're only finished because they won't let us really use technology. They say we're running out of metals. There's more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get 'em." "Can we?" "You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it's raining soup, and we don't even know about soup bowls.

A civilization has the ethics it can afford. We