“I use nothing but Kodak Wholopan R myself. The rating is 2400, to start with, which means there’s practically nothing you can’t catch, and there’s ninety-five per cent recovery on a division factor of twenty, which means you never need more than one print and a pair of scissors.”
“No, that’s what’s so extraordinary. Freefly-suiting is terrific exercise, a sort of dynamic tension method because all your muscles are working against each other. Of course, you have to watch your calcium balance like a spy, but there are treatments which actually improve it over normal Earthside levels now.”
“The acceleratube makes commuting perfectly possible. I can get to work quicker from Buffalo than I used to when I lived in Elizabeth.”
“I think I’ll have to take copter lessons.”
“You know that magnificent new block in Delaware that we spotted from the plane as we were coming in and thought what a great place it could be to live? Well, I just met someone who told me what it’s meant for, and unless you feel like going out and shooting a fuzzy-wuzzy we can kiss the dream goodbye. It’s a sheeting jail, that’s what it is—a new maxecurity jail!”
“We’re going to have to do as they’ve done in London and Frankfurt. We’re going to have to make better use of the space already enclosed by the cities we have. In London they’ve more or less given up the idea of streets except for arterial throughways. They’re building over them and leaving nothing but tubeways for passenger transit.”
“It just sort of folded like a leaky accordion, all thirty storeys of it. Girders bulged outwards, floors lay down on top of each other, and squelch, all the people who were living in it—I think they said nine hundred—were flattened out like sardines in a sandwich. Apparently when they programmed the computer which designed it they forgot to instruct it to allow for the weight of the occupants.”
“Exceptionally good freevent the other night. It was literally indescribable because it was so abstract. I still haven’t got over it.”
“What it does is sort of invert the responses—for example I never found anything in my life quite so funny as the B Minor Mass. And let’s face it, you know, in the ultimate analysis that’s a proper response in contemporary terms.”
“Yes, I knew somebody who applied to them. Wanted to go out being gored by a bull in front of a big cheering audience, believe it or not. So they fixed it, got the setup from Mexico, wrung the buckadingdongs out of him and the cost ran to plenty, of course, and he had a heart attack from overexcitement before they turned the bull loose, so back he went to hospital to be revived and he ran out of funds while he was getting better and in the end he just signed an ordinary release and they withdrew his prosthetics. A débâcle on a grand scale, but still a débâcle!”
“He and his sister joined the Mrs. Grundy Memorial Foundation and some sheeting little prig turned up some forgotten ordinance and the case comes up next week. Going to be a major point of principle at stake.”
“Skiing in Patagonia, I think. We were going to spend it under the Caribbean, but Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere go there such a lot we’re afraid it’ll be dreadfully crowded.”
“She’s quite marvellous. All I did was give her that lock of my mother’s hair and she told me the most fantastic things—I mean, I never knew mother had all those affairs, one after the other, and most of them with brown-noses! I knew I was right not to trust her with what father left!”
“The Vedantas, of course, say something quite contrary.”
“One of these Antarctic treks, probably. I hate the snow but whereinole else is there that Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere haven’t been recently? I can’t stand all these interchangeable people!”
“The future is inherently perfectly knowable. All the faculty takes to develop is the proper kind of exercise and meditation.”
“You sound as though you fell in love with Beninia right from the start. Was it just because you knew and admired Zadkiel Obomi or was there something else to it?”
“There’s this tour to Khajuraho which sounds like fun, with all those parties planned around the erotic sculptures on the old temples, but apparently the tourists have to go there under armed guard because of danger from native robbers and frankly I don’t see how I could enjoy it to the full with a circle of gunmen standing all around me.”
“This marvellous recording of the Ninth which puts you right in the middle of the choir—when the Ode to Joy lets loose it’s like an earthquake!”
“I’ve been painting some Jackson Pollocks with my polyformer this week and it’s left my arms stiff as fenceposts.”
“Moonbase Zero is more like a submarine than anything else. I really admire the people who stay there for a whole tour—some of them stick it for over six months, you realise?”
“Our shrinker recommended sending Shirley to this new school at Great Bend and I think that’s a marvellous idea but Olaf has these dreadfully antique views about juvenile eroticism and says they lay too much emphasis on sensuality, so I’m going to file for divorce and get custody and then Wendy and I will take her out there ourselves.”
“Makes you wonder how our ancestors ever managed to breed such a sheeting horde of human beings when every time you felt like it you had to take off all these layers and layers of cloth.”
“I think I’m going to sue them even though they didn’t give me a guarantee. I mean, eight thousand isn’t to be dropped like an empty pack of reefers, is it? And all the pup did when we got it home was sit around snivelling and pee on the floor every half-hour. The prodgies were heart-broken, of course, because they did so much want a green dog and they just wept and wept so I’m sure it was traumatic for them. Edna says I should have gone to some other company who’ve cut down the side-effects, but believe me I’m not going to risk another gene-moulded pet. They can make do with a regular cat next time.”
“Well, if your genotype is okay, why don’t you just get yourself preg by someone else who’s also clean? Me, for example? I have my genalysis with me, as it happens.”
“Charlie, got any stiffener with you? I just had this shiggy in the roof-garden and I promised Louise as well and I don’t want to be left dangling when the big scene takes over later.”
“This mutated cactus with the huge orange flowers that last for weeks after they’re cut, but you have to keep them under a glass bell because they do stink rather, a bit like rotting meat.”
“I never took to polyforming. Rather stay with my old hobby of vicarious music. Blocky it may be, but I don’t have the talent to go through a Cage score on my own jets, and I do love the feeling of actually creating the sounds with my fingers.”
“The bleeder slipped her a cap of Yaginol while she was preg and of course they had to abort the phocomelus. She’s suing him.”
“Thinking of cutting out to join one of these communities in Arizona.”
“Dead set on going into the space service but I guess he’ll grow out of it when he discovers shiggies.”
“Sold my shares in Hitrip like a sheeting idiot and then two months later they announced the Too Much strain and I guess I lost fifty thousand buckadingdongs on the deal.”
“So they programmed Shalmaneser with the formula for Triptine, you see, and then these jokers fed in the question How Hi is a Chinaman.”
“I think instead of increasing it to four months’ vacation they should operate two shifts on monthly rotation. Of course it would cost but the degree to which it would increase the self-respect of the employees would more than make up for it.”
“Most of them seem to be at it in the roof-garden. Want to go and watch, get some pressure up for later?”
“I think these cigarettes are horrible. Made my throat so sore. And my guts are all sour and nasty. Did people really use twenty in a day?”