Quotes by John W., Jr. Campbell

“Eventually Blake followed his winding footsteps back toward the ship, and about where his footsteps snowed he’d gathered his first samples, he stopped. There was a Japanese maple there. It stood some fifteen feet tall, and the bark was beautifully regular in appearance. The leaves were nearly a quarter of an inch thick, and arranged with a peculiar regularity, as were the branches. But it was very definitely a Japanese maple.””

“From horizon to horizon, the blue ice of the bald plateau stretched out under winking stars, the calmest and clearest air they had seen since reaching this wind-swept dome. The northern horizon was barely washed with rose and crimson and green, the southern horizon black mystery sweeping off to the pole. The auroral lights wavered in shimmering curtains about them, intensified slightly off to the northeast, in the direction of Big Magnet base and the magnetic pole. The brightest stars had dancing crystalline duplicates in the sparkling ice underfoot.””

“The four men still chopped and hacked into the cold-brittled ice. A sloping, step-nicked tube grew down into the ice, the solid blue of the stuff began to scintillate with blinding, intense azures, pure rays of sapphire, the chips became huge wealths of discarded emeralds, sapphires and rubies. The sun’s slanting rays were piercing down, heatless, through nearly twenty feet of crystalline ice. Still the magnetic needle pointed straight downward.””

“The temperature was rising slowly, toward -40°,””

“Look, you remember how fish we caught down near the Ross Sea would freeze almost as soon as we got ’em on deck, and come to life if we thawed ’em out. Low forms of life aren’t killed by fast freezing”

“Niente che la Terra abbia mai generato ha provato l'indicibile sublimazione di furia devastatrice che questa cosa lasciò scatenare sul proprio volto quando si guardò intorno venti milioni di anni fa e si vide circondata dalla desolazione e dal ghiaccio.””

“Quel posto puzzava. Un odore bizzarro e composito, come può esserci soltanto nelle baracche sepolte nel ghiaccio di un accampamento antartico, un misto di fetido sudore umano, e dell'afrore ammorbante d'olio di pesce ricavato dal grasso di foca sciolto. Un vago sentore di linimento combatteva l'odore muffito delle pellicce infradiciate dal sudore e dalla neve. Il sentore acre del grasso alimentare bruciato, e l'odore animale e non del tutto sgradevole dei cani, diluito dal tempo, aleggiavano nell'aria.Gli odori residui dell'olio da macchina contrastavano nettamente con quelli dei rivestimenti e del cuoio. Eppure, in mezzo a tutto quel puzzo di esseri umani, di cani, di macchine e di cucina, c'era un altro tanfo. Era qualcosa di strano, che faceva rizzare i capelli sulla nuca, un debolissimo sentore alieno tra gli odori della attività e della vita. Ed era un odore di vita.””