“Can you imagine getting on this kind of ground in the normal course of things? It would be insane.” “It’s insane now,” Nadia said sourly. “Well, what can we do? We can’t go back, and we can’t give up. These are the times that try men’s souls.” “Women, however, do fine.”

“People who in the lab are as hard-headed as can be—you should see Phyllis grilling the conclusions her colleagues draw from their data! And then suddenly they start using all kinds of debater’s tricks, evasions, qualifications, fuzzy thinking of every kind. As if they were an entirely different person.” “You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.

He stared at his coffee cup, looked up at her, then back down at the cup. It was impossible. A sentence was pronouncing itself in his mind, each word equally weighted: I killed John. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “What do you mean?”

there is never a case of truly pure research. Because the people who pay for the scientist islands will eventually want a return on their investment.

“I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she was saying rapidly, “really you are so good in those situations, so clear and firm and sharp. They believe you because you don’t try to flatter them or soften the truth.” “That’s what works best,” he said, looking out the window at the tents running by. “Especially when you’re flattering them

“You should know better than that! All life support here is hooked back ultimately to Earth. But they have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and we don’t. You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The

“They told us not to come here if we wanted to get outdoors much. It’s not like that on Mars, they said.” “Who do they think they’re fooling?” “We can see the video you sent back as well as they can.” “Hell, every other article you read is about the Mars underground, and how they’re communists or nudists or Rosicrucians—” “Utopias or caravans or

Nadia stared at her. “Well. Ann. It’s radiation keeping us underground more than anything. What you’re saying in effect is that you want the radiation to go away. Which means thickening the atmosphere, which means terraforming.” “I know.” Her voice was tight, so tight that suddenly the careful matter-of-fact tone was lost and forgotten. “Don’t you

Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces.”