Women talk when they want to. Or don't.

The shamans are forever yacking about their snake oil miracles. I prefer the real McCoy, a pregnant woman.

When the citizens of a nation will no longer volunteer to defend it, then it is probably not worth saving. No nation has the right to survive with conscript troops, and in the long run, no nation ever has.

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can - and must - be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly - and no doubt will keep trying.

Spacemen - men who work in space, pilots and jetmen and astrogators and such - are men who like a few million miles of elbow room.

Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.

No storyteller has been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe.