For a while in those years we were calling great ones out of the past, to find out what they were like. This was in the middle twelves—12400 to 12450, say. We called up Caesar and Antony, and also Cleopatra. We got Freud and Marx and Lenin into the same room and let them talk. We summoned Winston Churchill, who was a disappointment (he lisped and drank too much), and Napoleon, who was magnificent. We raided ten millennia of history for our sport.
I shall write the history of that strange and unique woman, the mother of my thirty brothers and myself, Miss Donna Mitchell. She was a person of extraordinary strength and vision, our mother.
He stopped and watched the smoke. The first thought that came to him was to hang back cautiously, but then he shook his head and kept moving. This was his world, and he was going to keep the upper hand.
They saw him first, though, and before he was aware of anything, ten blue-skinned men had stepped out of the woods and were kneeling at his feet.
Ben Azai was deemed worthy and stood at the gate of the sixth palace and saw the ethereal splendor of the pure marble plates. He opened his mouth and said twice, “Water! Water!” In the twinkling of an eye they decapitated him and threw eleven thousand iron bars at him. This shall be a sign for all generations that no one should err at the gate of the sixth palace.
She hurries down the dirty street toward the tall brick building. This is the place. Upstairs. Fifth floor, apartment 5-J. As she starts to ring the doorbell, a tall, lean man steps out of the shadows and clamps his hand powerfully around her wrist. “Time Patrol,” he says crisply, flashing an identification badge. “You’re under arrest for contemplated temponautic murder, Mrs. Porter.”
“You see,” Mahler said, tapping his desk. “They’ve just found another one. We’re constantly bombarded with you people. When you get to the Moon, you’ll find a whole Dome full of them. I’ve sent over four thousand there myself since I took over the bureau. And that was eight years ago—in 2776. An average of five hundred a year. Hardly a day goes by without someone dropping in on us.”
No one expected volcanos to sprout up in and around Los Angeles. Cal Mattison has to deal with the aftermath.
The barker said, “Come, then, let me show you this splendid wizardry! It attracts men to women, women to men, and makes virgins rush out of their homes to find lovers!” He reached behind him, snatched up a rolled parchment scroll, and waved it in front of Menandros’s nose. “Here, friend, here! You take a pure papyrus and write on it, with the blood of an ass, the magical words contained on this…”
He narrowed his eyes and stared into the distance, searching for this day’s prey. His bow of several fine woods, the bow that no man but he was strong enough to draw–no man but he and Enkidu his beloved thrice-lost friend–hung loosely from his hand. His body was poised and ready. Come now, you beasts! Come and be slain! It is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who would make his sport with you this day!
There was a mingling of traits in her that I found instantly irresistible: she seemed both shy and steel-strong, passionate and vulnerable, confident and ill at ease.
I have revealed myself, thinking to drive her away in terror; she is no longer aghast, and smiles at my strangeness. She will accept the evidence of her eyes.
Amanda had always had a good eye for detail. And at the particular moment she had spotted the alien on South Main she had been unusually alert, sensitive, all raw nerves, every antenna up.
“I love you. Nothing will ever end for us. Nothing.”
Listen to me, Temujin. Think of another world far from yours. There is a Temujin in that world too, son of Yesugei, husband to Bortei who is daughter of Dai the Wise. He is a great warrior, that other Temujin. No one can withstand him.
“I don’t see. Not really. I’m just as blind as you think I am. It’s called blindsight,” Farkas said. “Proprioceptive vision.”
This part of Mexico was famous for its masks, grotesque and terrifying ones portraying devils and monsters and fiends.
What I want is to disappear. I have to be weightless in order to get there. Where I am now, it’s only a beginning. I need to lose all the rest.
Gripping time travel tale of a penal colony located in the Cambrian period. Fraught with political overtones, this critically acclaimed story is one of Silverberg’s personal favorites.
A couple at a dinner party explain their latest excursion.
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