There was such a thing as salvation. But— Not for everyone.

‘To the primitive mind,’ Eldritch said, ‘the unclean and the holy are confused. Merged merely as taboo.

‘I’m unclean,’ Barney informed him. ‘WHO TOLD YOU THAT?’ ‘An animal out in the desert. And it had never seen me before; it knew it just by coming close to me.’ While still five feet away, he thought to himself.

‘May I eat you?’ it asked. And panted, avidly slack-jawed.

It looks into our eyes; and it looks out of our eyes.

‘An artificial hand. And a distortion of my jaw. And my eyes—’ ‘Yes,’ she said tightly. ‘The mechanical, slitted eyes. What did it mean?’ Barney said, ‘It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.’ In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called - stigmata.

‘That thing,’ he said, speaking to them all, especially to Norm Schein and his wife, ‘has a name which you’d recognize if I told it to you. Although it would never call itself that. We’re the ones who’ve titled it. From experience, at a distance, over thousands of years. But sooner or later we were bound to be confronted by it. Without the distance. Or the years.’ Anne Hawthorne said, ‘You mean God.’

That’s my gift to you, and remember: in German Gift means poison.

‘Okay! I’ll make you a stone, put you by a seashore; you can lie there and listen to the waves for a couple of million years. That ought to satisfy you.’ You dumb jerk, he thought savagely. A stone! Christ!

‘Make me into a stone.’ ‘Why?’ Barney Mayerson said, ‘So I can’t feel. There’s nothing for me anywhere.’

I’m sorry, he said to himself, apologizing to his somatic part.

he had foresight, almost to the point where it was like what I have now, like hindsight.

Like Shakespeare says, some damn thing about sticking a mere pin in through the armor, and goodbye king.

her mind was not even made up - there was, to her, simply no reality to which he was referring.

The time, then, had come for him to poison himself so that an economic monopoly could be kept alive, a sprawling, interplan empire from which he now derived nothing.

Did you ever read Paul?’ ‘Paul who?’

Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion?

“Think the least gift that he giveth is great; and the most despisable things take as special gifts and as great tokens of love.”

‘I was going to suggest Augustine’s Confessions in the style of Lichtenstein - funny, of course.’

Barney, dutifully, said, ‘You insert one of the Great Books, for instance Moby-Dick, into the reservoid. Then you set the controls for long or short. Then for funny version, or same-as-book or sad version. Then you set the style-indicator as to which classic Great Artist you want the book animated like. Dali, Bacon, Picasso . . . the medium-priced Great Books animator is set up to render in cartoon form the styles of a dozen system-famous artists; you specify which ones you want when you originally buy the thing. And there are options you can add later that provide even more.’

‘She took it philosophically.’

Evidently subject matter had no bearing; he had never realized this before.

‘You learn to get by from day to day,’ Sam Regan said sympathetically to him. ‘You never think in longer terms. Just until dinner or until time for bed; very finite intervals and tasks and pleasures. Escapes.’