Glory Road

I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem and no population explosionno Cold War and no H-bombs and no television commercialsno Summit Conferences, no Foreign Aid, no hidden taxes -- no income tax. The climate is the sort that Florida and California claim and neither has, the land is lovely, the people are friendly and hospitable to strangers, the women are beautiful and amazingly anxious to please. I could go back. I could..Ch. 1 Introduction

There is an old picture of a people traveling by sleigh through deep woods — pursued by wolves. Every now and then they grab one of their number and toss him to the wolves. Thats conscription even if you call it selective service and pretty it up with USOs and veterans benefits — its tossing a minority to the wolves while the rest go on with that single-minded pursuit of the three-car garage, the swimming pool, and the safe & secure retirement benefits.Ch. 1

— Glory Road people

It wasn’t a war — not even a “Police Action.” We were “Military Advisers.” But a Military Adviser who has been dead four days in that heat smells the same way a corpse does in a real war.Ch. 1

— Glory Road war

Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department.Ch. 1

— Glory Road god

There are wonderful night clubs in Nice but you need not patronize them as the floor show at the beaches is as goodand free. I never appreciated what a high art the fan dance can be until the first time I watched a French girl get out of her clothes and into her bikini in plain sight of citizens, tourists, gendarmes, dogs — and me — all without quite violating the lenient French mores concerning indecent exposure. Or only momentarily.Ch. 2

— Glory Road time

I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or security. There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be. Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interestCh. 3

— Glory Road time

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, The games afoot! I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be — instead of the tawdry, lousy fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance — for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be — And I had known itand I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.Ch. 3

— Glory Road romance

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 personWords of an advertisement E. C. Gordon later known as Oscar keeps encountering. Ch. 3

— Glory Road knowledge

I picked up and balanced them all and found there the blade that suited me the way Excalibur suited Arthur. Ive never seen one quite like it so I dont 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.Ch. 5

— Glory Road art

I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I read that silly ad had been impossible. So I chucked logic. Logic is a feeble reed, friend. Logic proved that airplanes cant fly and that H-bombs wont work and that stones dont fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didnt happen yesterday wont happen tomorrow.Ch. 5

— Glory Road work

The person who says smugly that good manners are the same everywhere and people are just people hasn’t been farther out of Podunk than the next whistle stop.Ch. 8

— Glory Road art

I learned, first time out on patrol, that nothing hikes up that old biological urge like being shot at and living through it.Ch. 8

— Glory Road time

“This is a crazy sort of country, you must admit. Utterly insane.” “Mmmm” he answered. “Have you ever been in Washington, D. C.?” “Well—” I grinned wryly. “Touché!”Ch. 9

— Glory Road you

Oscar, so far as I know, your culture is the only semicivilized one in which love is not recognized as the highest art and given the serious study it deserves.Star, Empress of the Twenty Universes, to Oscar. Ch. 10

— Glory Road love

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.Star, Ch. 10

— Glory Road world

Natural law never takes a holiday. The invariability of natural law is the cornerstone of science.Oscar, Ch. 10

— Glory Road science

An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted. And pride is too heavy baggage for my journey; I have none.Ch. 10

— Glory Road journey

Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.Ch. 10

— Glory Road justice

An old family recipe: Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adders fork and blind-worms sting, Lizards leg and howlets wing —Shakespeare! I said. Macbeth. Cool it with a baboons blood —No, Will got it from me, milord love. Thats the way with writers; theyll steal anything, file off the serial numbers, and claim it for their own.Ch. 11

— Glory Road love

No evolutionary quirk can be considered odd if you use the way octopi make love as a comparison.Ch. 12

— Glory Road love

There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is—and doesn’t forgive ignorance.Ch. 13

— Glory Road world

Magic is not science, it is a collection of ways to do things — ways that work but often we dont know why.Ch. 13

— Glory Road science

She drew the true paths in glowing red, false ones in green — and there was a lot more green than red. The critter who designed that tower had a twisty mind. What appeared to be the main entrance went in, up, branched and converged, passed close to the Chamber of the Egg — then went back down by a devious route and dumped you out, like P. T. Barnums This Way to the Egress.Ch. 13

— Glory Road mind

These Gates are not true gates; there is always a matter of timing. This one will be ready to open, for a few minutes, about seven hours from now, then cannot be opened again for several weeks.Ch. 13

— Glory Road true

Karate and many serious forms of combat boxing isnt serious, nor anything with rules — all these work that same way: go-for-broke, all-out attack with no wind up. These are not so much skills as an attitude.Ch. 14

— Glory Road work

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 cant shoot, he has to stop you before you reach him. Close on a man carrying a blade and youll 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 cant be taught to raw recruits in weeks, nor even months.Ch. 15

— Glory Road art

There is a go-for-broke tactic, the target, taught by the best swordmasters, which consists in headlong advance with arm, wrist, and blade in full extension — all attack and no attempt to parry. But it works only by perfect timing when you see your opponent slacken up momentarily. Otherwise it is suicide.Ch. 15

— Glory Road work

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 dont 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.Ch. 15

— Glory Road life

Sword-play is an odd thing; you dont really use your mind, it is much too fast for that. Your wrist thinks and tells your feet and body what to do, bypassing your brainCh. 15

— Glory Road mind

He smiled at his own wit. The old bastard always had thought he was a wit. He was half right.Ch. 15

— Glory Road thought

Dont worry, customs are simple here. Primitive societies are always more complex than civilized ones — and this one isnt primitive.Ch. 17

— Glory Road worry

The one thing that stood out as this empirical way of running an empire grew up was that the answer to most problems was: Dont do anything. Always King Log, never King Stork — Live and let live. Let well enough alone. Time is the best physician. Let sleeping dogs lie. Leave them alone and theyll come home, wagging their tails behind them. Even positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form: Thou Shalt Not Blow Up Thy Neighbors Planet. Blow your own if you wish. Hands off the guardians of the Gates. Dont demand justice, you too will be judged. Above all, dont put serious problems to a popular vote.Ch. 17

— Glory Road time

Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in many primitive societiesbut he didn’t know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”Ch. 17, Vox Populi, Vox Dei is usually translated The voice of the people is the voice of God.

— Glory Road god

I asked him how advanced societies ran things. His brow wrinkled. “Mostly they don’t.”Ch. 17

— Glory Road

The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive — and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity, never seeking perfection, no Utopias — just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes. Local affairs are local. Infanticide? — theyre your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief — the Empire is ponderously unhelpful.Ch. 17

— Glory Road work

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 couldnt 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.Ch. 17

— Glory Road time

She believed that a woman’s costume was a failure unless it made men want to tear it off.Ch. 18

— Glory Road men

Culturologists state a law of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a law of nature. Rufo didnt agree; he said his colleagues stated as equations things which are not mensurate and not definable — holes in their heads! — and that freedom was never more than a happy accident because the common jerk, all human races, hates and fears all freedom, not only for his neighbors but for himself, and stamps it out wherever possible.Ch. 18

— Glory Road religion

I know, as the prime lesson of my profession, that good intentions are the source of more folly than all other causes put together.Ch. 19

— Glory Road good

I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. ‘Democracy.’ A curious delusion—as if adding zeros could produce a sum.Ch. 20

— Glory Road sin

Democracy cant work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, thats all there is — so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group. But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesnt work. Any social organization does well enough if it isnt rigid. The framework doesnt matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.Rufo to Oscar, Ch. 20

— Glory Road wisdom

Your country has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time — unless its looseness is destroyed from inside.Rufo to Oscar, Ch. 20

— Glory Road time

Wherever you go, you will make yourself felt, you wont be one of the herd. I respect you, and I dont respect many. Never people as a whole, I could never be a democrat at heart. To claim to respect and even to love the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries. It isnt a political system, its a disease.Rufo to Oscar, Ch. 20

— Glory Road love

Would you force me to buy a new rug? I never keep one I’ve killed a friend on; the stains make me gloomy.Ch. 20

— Glory Road you

You were the key, first to be found, then ground to fit. You yourself act, youre never a puppet, or you could never have won. She was the only one who could nudge and wheedle such a man and place him where he would act; no lesser person than She could handle the scale of hero She needed. So She searched until She found himand honed him fine. Tell me, why did you take up the sword? Its not common in America.Rufo to Oscar, Ch. 20

— Glory Road self

I explained the improvement and that I had done the drawing a better way to— He cut me off. “We don’t want it done a better way, we want it done our way.” “Your privilege,” I agreed and resigned by walking out.Ch. 22

— Glory Road men

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 youll eat or where or if, nor where youll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.Ch. 22, Heinlein here quotes Tennysons poem Ulysses

— Glory Road life

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?Ch. 22

— Glory Road you

Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things arent dull around him — and he would die defending your rear. So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all! Got any dragons you need killed?Ch. 22

— Glory Road you

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