Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.

Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

I am on an expense account that would blow your mind.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.