We (Momentum Classic Science Fiction)

a male Number—a very thin flattened man. He might have been cut out of a sheet of paper. Wherever he was, whichever way he turned, he showed only a profile, a sharply pointed, glittering blade of a nose, and lips like scissors.

O-90 lifted her face from the pillow and without opening her eyes she said, “Go away.” But because she was crying she pronounced it “Oo aaa-ay.” For some reason this absurd detail will not leave my memory.

A fragment of iron ore probably feels the same joy of submission to precise, inevitable law when it clings to a lodestone.