The Abominal Earthman (1963) SSC
Page 16
Now I am not afraid of Him. A galaxy twenty billion years old has given me courage. If there was no monobloc there can have been no God Who made it. I live in the hope of the glorious steady state!
It was weak and wicked of me to give Donner a gun to point at the world, therefore, and I expect it is fair if I die taking it back; but it is not to save the world that I do it but to save my own soul in the galaxies yet to be born. For if the steady state is true there is no end to time. And infinity is not bounded, in any way. Everything must happen in infinity. Everything must happen . . . an infinity of times.
So Martin, in those times to come, when these atoms that compose us come together again, under what cis-Andromedan star I cannot imagine, we will meet—if there is infinity it is sure—and I can hope. In that day may we be put together more cleanly, Martin. And may we meet again, all of us, in shapes of pleasing strength and health, members of a race that is, I pray, a little wiser and more kind.
That was the letter from Dr. Rhine Cooperstock. I folded it away. I called my secretary on the intercom to tell her that his suite would now be free for another patient; and I went out into the spring day, to the great black headlines with Donner's name over all the papers and to the life that Cooperstock had given back to us all.