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. "You want that sword and stone? Cheap but it
has to be cash. Can't let you have credit; your life expectancy isn't all that
good. Shall we say six hundred thousand imperial dollars in small bills? No
denomination higher than ten thousand."
"Professor, I don't want a sword in a stone; it's just that this whole
silly business sounds like the 'true prince' nonsense of pre-Armstrong romances.
Can't do it openly with money, can't do it safely with enough force to hold the
losses down to zero, has to be me and my wife with nothing but a scout knife.
That's a crummy plot; even a confessions book would reject it. It's logically
impossible."
"Five hundred fifty thousand and I pick up the sales tax."
"Richard," Jubal Harshaw answered, "it is logic itself that is impossible.
For millennia philosophers and saints have tried to reason out a logical scheme
for the universe... until Hilda came along and demonstrated that the universe is
not logical but whimsical, its structure depending solely on the dreams and
nightmares of non-logical dreamers." He shrugged, almost spilling his Tuborg.
"If the great brains had not been so hoodwinked by their shared conviction that
the universe must contain a consistent and logical structure they could find by
careful analysis and synthesis, they would have spotted the glaring fact that
the universe-the multiverse-contains neither of logic nor justice save where we,
or others like us, impose such qualities on a world of chaos and cruelty
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