SCANNERS LIVE IN VAIN

(Tune and words by Zander Nyrond)

Tune your blood away from anger, watch your steps with care.
Speak not to your loved one, for she hates your voice's blare.
Guard your feelings, quell your passions, govern your desire,
To spend another hour or two beneath the cranching wire, for--

Yours is the duty, perilous and high,
To keep men whole and living when they dearly long to lie:
Yours is the honour, yours is the pain,
Let no-one steal it from you, or the Scanners Live In Vain.

At the scanners' high assembly, you alone can feel,
Watch your friends, like walking corpses, somehow less than real.
Taste the fear behind the silence, there for you alone.
Hear the sentence passed upon a man named Adam Stone.

Yours is the challenge, that only you can face,
To save unaltered humans from the first effect of space.
Yours is the power, rooted in the brain,
If men no longer need it, then the Scanners Live In Vain.

Adam Stone has found the answer, so the spies avow,
Normal men can fly to space, no need for scanners now,
Pack the hulls with lesser lives to shield the men who fly;
Condemn the Confraternity to fade away and die.

Yours is the glory, yours is the pride,
To labour in the up-and-out to spread man's empire wide,
Yours is the bitterness, yours is the bane,
If Stone should be successful then the Scanners Live In Vain.

So you try to stay your comrades, try to change their minds,
But your cranched perceptions make you other than their kind.
Merciful, implacable, they rule you out of place,
And send your friend to kill the man who sought to open space.

Theirs is the vengeance, yours is the guilt,
For you can see their deed will shatter that they have built.
theirs the decision, only you abstain,
But that will have no meaning when the Scanners Live In Vain.

Creeping through the darkened city, cranched and in disguise,
Seek the way to Stone's apartment, hide from prying eyes.
While you're there, Parizianski comes to do the deed:
More in sorrow than in rage, you go into High Speed.

His is the mission, his is the right,
And armoured in his righteousness he looms larger in your sight.
Yours is the greater strength, the sudden edge you gain--
Parizianski has to die, lest Scanners Live In Vain.

Coming back to consciousness, you feel that something's wrong.
Your ears can hear, your hands can feel, your instruments are gone.
Adam Stone has made you human, first of all your kind:
The scanners will be chiefs of space, and none be left behind.

Yours is the future, you will lead the way,
Taking normal men to space where you alone held sway.
Yours are the planets, and all that they contain,
For Stone has been successful, and the Scanners Live once more,
but not In Vain.