"But," said Caroline, "we can understand your thoughts. You can understand ours. And yet we are as far removed from you as they.”
The Engineer said nothing.
"And you look like us," said Tommy, quietly. 'We are protoplasm and you are metal, but we each have arms and legs…”
"It means nothing," said the Engineer. "Absolutely nothing how a thing is made, the shape that one is made in." There was almost an edge of anger in his thoughts.
"Don't you worry, old man," said Herb. 'We'll save the universe. I don't know how in hell we'll do it, but we'll save it for you.”
"Not for us," the Engineer corrected, "but for those others. For all life that now exists within the universe. For all life that in time to come may exist within the universe.”
"There," said Gary, hardly realizing that he spoke aloud, "is an ideal big enough for any man.”
An ideal. Something to fight for. A spur that kept Man going on, striving, fighting his way ahead.
Save the universe for that monstrosity in the glass sphere with its shifting vapors, for the little, wriggling, slug-like things, for the mottled terror with the droopy mouth and the glint of humor in his eyes.
"But how?" asked Tommy. "How are we going to do it?”