Out of the night that covers me,       Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be       For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance       I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance       My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears       Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years       Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate,       How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate,       I am the captain of my soul. William Ernest Henley, Invictus .  1920.

UNDER OLD EARTH by CORDWAINER SMITH Down into Old Earth the Lord hastened —to do one great last deed, and die! I need a temporary dog For a temporary fob On a temporary place     like Earth! —Song from The Merchant of Menace I There were the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives—even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives—against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If ...