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"An old family recipe: 'Eye of newt and toe of frog,'Wool of bat and tongue of dog,'Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,'Lizard's leg and howlet's wing — '""Shakespeare!" I said. "Macbeth.""'Cool it with a baboon's blood — ' No, Will got it from me, milord love. That's the way with writers; they'll steal anything, file off the serial numbers, and claim it for their own."
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"I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees." A long road, a trail, a "Tramp Royal," with no certainty of what you'll eat or where or if, nor where you'll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.
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"Lady Vivamus" Sword
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"Utopias in Science : Fiction Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road"
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A man who always obeys the law is even stupider than one who breaks it every chance.
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A properly balanced sword is the most versatile weapon for close quarters ever devised. Pistols and guns are all offense, no defense; close on him fast and a man with a gun can't shoot, he has to stop you before you reach him. Close on a man carrying a blade and you'll be spitted like a roast pigeon — unless you have a blade and can use it better than he can. A sword never jams, never has to be reloaded, is always ready. Its worst shortcoming is that it takes great skill and patient, loving practice to gain that skill; it can't be taught to raw recruits in weeks, nor even months.
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ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weigh about 190 pounds, fluent English with some French, proficient with all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person...
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Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon?
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I did the only really brave thing I have ever done in my life: I inched forward. Bravery is going on anyhow when you are so terrified your sphincters won't hold and you can't breathe and your heart threatens to stop, and that is an exact description for that moment of E. C. Gordon, ex-Pfc. and hero by trade. I was fairly certain what those two faint lights were and the closer I got the more certain I was — I could smell the damned thing and place its outlines. A rat. Not the common rat that lives in city dumps and sometimes gnaws babies, but a giant rat, big enough to block that rat hole but enough smaller than I am to have room to maneuver in attacking me — room I didn't have at all. The best I could do was to wriggle forward with my sword in front of me and try to Keep the point aimed so that I would catch him with it, make him eat steel—because if he dodged past that point I would have nothing but bare hands and no room to use them.
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I knew in three seconds that I was up against a better swordsman than myself, with a wrist like steel yet supple as a striking snake. He was the only swordsman I have ever met who used prime and octave — used them, I mean, as readily as sixte and carte. Everyone learns them and my own master made me practice them as much as the other six — but most fencers don't use them; they simply may be forced into them, awkwardly and just before losing a point. I would lose, not a point, but my life — and I knew, long before the end of that first long phrase, that my life was what I was about to lose, by all odds.
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I may have seen what my mind could accept rather than exactly what happened. I mean "magic." How many times have savages concluded "magic" when a "civilized" man came along with something the savage couldn't understand? How often is some tag, such as "television," accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when "magic" would be the honest word? Still, Star never insisted on that word. She accepted it when I insisted on it.But I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.
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I picked up and balanced them all... and found there the blade that suited me the way Excalibur suited Arthur. I've never seen one quite like it so I don't know what to call it. A saber, I suppose, as the blade was faintly curved and razor sharp on the edge and sharp rather far back on the back. But it had a point as deadly as a rapier and the curve was not enough to keep it from being used for thrust and counter quite as well as chopping away meat-axe style. The guard was a bell curved back around the knuckles into a semi-basket but cut away enough to permit full moulinet from any guard.It balanced in the forte less than two inches from the guard, yet the blade was heavy enough to chop bone. It was the sort of sword that feels as if it were an extension of your body.
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I was twenty-one but couldn’t figure out which party to vote against.
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May it please milord Hero, the world is not what we wish it to be. It is what it is. No, I have over-assumed. Perhaps it is indeed what we wish it to be. Either way, it is what it is.
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Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can't be ignored.