The Dreadful Lemon Sky

Hascomb snatched an ancient weapon out of his glove compartment. Officers have smuggled them home from the last five wars. The Colt.45 automatic.

I am skeptical of all of the so-termed marvelous advances of science. And I am suspicious of anything which tries to look like something it isn’t. Thus it would seem that a coal-tar derivative patterned to look like bleached teak would turn me totally off. But it is so damned practical. If you should ever have an artery which can’t be repaired, it can be replaced with woven Dacron. And, wearing that in your gut, it would be unseemly to go about muttering about the plastic world full of plastic people. So I stand on my plastic deck and mutter whatever I please. When did I make any claim about being consistent? Or even reasonable?

She has all the equipment and she’s pretty, but something’s left out. Fred got her a little bit bombed on wine and then he took her. It wasn’t exactly rape, but it was as close as it could get and still not be. She hates him. He really hurt her, because she’s built small, and that Fred has … well, all I can say is that you’d never know, looking at him, so kind of slender and girlish almost. And pretty. But he’s a bull. He’s huge. He’s so huge he’s sort of scary. And … he likes to hurt. I don’t like kinky things. I like it, you know, for fun. It doesn’t seem to be fun for him. Oh, he knows a lot of tricks and so forth. But it’s more like he read up on it in engineering school. Once was enough for me. He’s with you but he isn’t.

You imagine a black circle about two inches behind your eyes, and big enough to fill your skull from ear to ear, from crown to jaw hinges. You know that each intrusion of thought is going to make a pattern on that perfect blackness. So you merely concentrate on keeping the blackness perfect, unmarked, and mathematically round. As you do that, you breathe slowly and steadily, and with each exhalation, you feel yourself sinking a tiny bit further into the mattress. And in moments you are asleep.

We are never the best judges of what is meaningful and what is trivial in our lives, I guess. The accidents of time and place change the script, and later we say it happened on purpose.

How do they do that, Professor?” “Because the visible ones act in erratic and inexplicable fashion. Their orbits are … warped. So you apply gravitational theory and a little geometry of moving spheres and you say, Aha, if there is a planetary body right there of such and such a mass and such and such an orbit, then all the random movements of the other planets become logical, even imperative.

asked. “Do you know how they locate invisible planets?” “No. How do they do that, Professor?” “Because the visible ones act in erratic and inexplicable fashion. Their orbits are … warped. So you apply gravitational theory and a little geometry of moving spheres and you say, Aha, if there is a planetary body right there of such and such a mass and such and such an orbit, then all the random movements of the other planets become logical, even imperative.

And it was okay because it had to be. There wasn't any other choice. Sometimes it is a relief not to have a choice. I will have to get Meyer to explain this concept to me.

You did very well, old friend." "Shall I blush and simper?" "If you don't keep it up for long. I hate blushing and simpering in a grown man when it goes on and on.

I don't like it anymore around here, Meyer. I want to go home. Every time I get blown up by a bomb I get that same feeling. I want to go home.

The biggest and most important reason in the world is to be together with someone in a way that makes life a little less bleak and solitary and lonesome. To exchange the I for We. In the biggest sense of the word, it's cold outside. And kindness and affection and gentleness build a nice warm fire inside.

There are too many of them in the world lately, the hopeful ladies who married grown-up boy children and soon lost all hope....They are not ardent libbers, yet at the same time they are not looking for some man to "take care." God knows they are experts at taking care of themselves. They just want a grown-up man to share their life with, each of them taking care. But there are one hell of a lot more grown-up ladies than grown-up men.

There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make 30 cents a unit when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus, the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin.

The early bird who gets the worm works for somebody who comes in late and owns the worm farm.

at the side and in back where doubtless they shaped up the corteges. I saw Carrie’s bright orange Datsun in the parking

single horrid strangled croak. Far off on the north-south highways there was the insect sound of the fast-moving trucks, whining toward warehouses, laden with emergency rush orders of plastic animals, roach tablets, eye shadow, ashtrays, toilet brushes, pottery crocodiles, and all the other items essential to a constantly increasing GNP.

...we both knew we were talking nonsense. The habit of involvement is not easily broken. It is even more pervasive than the habit of noninvolvement, the habit of walking away when the action starts.

Guilt is the most merciless disease of man. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all skies.

What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn't be experimental, I don't think.

It happens to people. They get to the point of explaining the mission and can't make it, so they go into a talking jag. She needed help. There was a thin edge of anxiety in her tone, and the words came too fast. So I gave her some help. "What have you got in the box?" I asked.

I have busted my gut to learn how to make people open up. Meyer was born with it. A loving empathy shines out of those little bright-blue eyes. Strangers tell him things they wouldn't tell their husband or their priest.