He shrugged, since he had been wondering about the same question.
"Well," she conceded, "maybe they will, at that. This time. With all the excitement and all. But what's going to happen a year or two from now, when everybody forgets what a wonderful person you were? Don't you see that nothing's really solved?" she demanded fiercely.
He looked down at her in surprise. "Nothing ever gets 'solved,' Annetta," he told her. "You just keep trying to make things a little better—for everybody, you see, and not just for yourself." He thought for a moment, and then added, "You do that if you can, I mean. And if you can't make them any better, then you just try to keep them from getting worse."
"That's all there is to look forward to?" she asked.
"What else could there be? But it's enough," he said. "You do what you can today, and then tomorrow, if you're lucky, maybe you can do a little more. We don't learn fast," he finished ruefully, "but maybe we will learn, sooner or later. At least we can hope, and what else do we need?"
Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort
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