It was not until after their simple evening meal, when they were sitting in the oak-benched living-room with the windows thrown open to let in the sweet night air scented with the perfume of the mauve and white stocks outside, that Alix remembered th...
Goodbye, darling. Goodbye, sweetheart. Alix Martin stood leaning over the small rustic gate, watching the retreating figure of her husband as he walked down the road in the direction of the village. Presently he turned a bend and was lost to sight, b...
I'd been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended. With nothing to do on the overnight shift but batch the insurance reports from the daytime shifts, I just started wandering around, over...
Class again. Living with Lit was doing a composition, and most of them were bent sweatily over their papers, putting their thoughts grimly down on the page, as if chopping wood. All but three. Robert Lawson, sitting in Billy Stearns's seat, David Gar...
Jim? Hmmm? Is something wrong? No. Those Living with Lit boys still giving you a hard time? No answer. Jim? No. Why don't you go to bed early tonight? But he didn't. The dream was very bad that night. When the kid with the strawberry birthmark stabbe...
SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK Jim Norman's wife had been waiting for him since two, and when she saw the car pull up in front of their apartment building, she came out to meet him. She had gone to the store and bought a celebration meala couple of steaks,...
THE WINDOW OF TIME Let me say, at the outset, that I dont blame my daughter for what happened. Actually, blame is too critical a word. What I mean to say is that my daughter was hardly responsible for what happened. Miriam is a good soul, a benevolen...
The Millennium: January 1, 20006:20 A.M. I was driving south on I-25 and kept sneaking glances through my half-closed eyes in hopes of seeing those first, dull, yellow rays of daylight crawling up from the horizon. My county in northern Wyoming is ap...
Its hard to argue with an old Indian or his tricks. I was driving Lonnie Little Bird up to Billings for an evening diabetes checkup at Deaconess Hospital when we pulled into the Blue Cow Caf, on the Crow Reservation just off I-90, for some supper. Th...
LISTEN to this, said Lady Cynthia Drage. She read aloud from the journal she held in her hand. Mr. and Mrs. Unkerton are entertaining a party at Greenways House this week. Amongst the guests are Lady Cynthia Drage, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Scott, Major P...
He was silent a minute or two, staring, not at the house, but at the thick undergrowth by which they were surrounded. Has it ever struck you, he said, that civilisation's damned dangerous? Dangerous? Such a revolutionary remark shocked Mr. Satterthwa...
Angus died peacefully in the St Helier Cottage Hospital the following Friday. Ruth and the twins were at his bedside. Max flew over for the funeral, and the next day accompanied the twins back to school. When Ruth waved them goodbye she wondered if s...
TOO MANY COINCIDENCES WHENEVER RUTH looked back on the past three years - and she often did - she came to the conclusion that Max must have planned everything right down to the last detail - yes, even before theyd met. They first bumped into each oth...
One by one the cryonic systems shut down. One by one the people returned to life, among them Victor Kemmings. What amazed him was the lack of a sense of the passage of time. He had entered the chamber, lain down, had felt the membrane cover him and t...
AFTER TAKEOFF the ship routinely monitored the condition of the sixty people sleeping in its cryonic tanks. One malfunction showed, that of person nine. His EEG revealed brain activity. Shit, the ship said to itself. Complex homeostatic devices locke...
