A new novel by “the undisputed idea man of the futuristic field” (to quote Forrest J. Ackerman) is bound to be an event of major interest to every science fiction reader. 

—from the back cover of the 1970 paperback

 Temporal Agent L-3H is always delectable in any shape; that’s why the Bureau employs her on marriage-prevention assignments. 

 There’s a project. A U.S. government project I guess you’d have to call it. Secret, naturally; as what isn’t in government these days? In my opinion, and that of a handful of others, it’s more important than all the nuclear, space-exploration, satellite, and rocket programs put together, though a hell of a lot smaller. I tell you right off that I can’t even hint what the project is about. And believe me, you’d never guess. 

 She said: “It’s a matter of weight, Mr. Chaney. The machine must propel itself and you into the future, which is an operation requiring a tremendous amount of electrical energy. The engineers have advised us that total weight is a critical matter, that nothing but the passenger must be put forward or returned. They insist upon minimum weight.”
    “Naked? All the way naked?” 

  . . . it would be our great privilege to bring to the hypergalactic masses, for the first time in temporal stasis, a glimpse of life on a simpler, more meaningless, and therefore highly illuminating scale. I pictured the proud intellects of Ikanion Nine, the lofty abstract cerebra of Yoop Two, the swarm-awareness of Vr One-ninety-nine, passing through these displays at so many megaergs per ego-complex, gathering insights into their own early evolutionary history. I hoped to see the little ones, their innocent organ clusters aglow, watching with shining radiation sensors as primitive organisms split atoms with stone axes, invented the wheel and the betatron, set forth on their crude Cunarders to explore the second dimension . . . 

 Oold Beth: Sometimes in life you have to make decisions and hope they come out for the best. You’ll know about that soon enough.
Young Liz: But I’ll never make your decisions, will I?
Oold Beth: Then how did I come to make them? We’re the same, Liz. But I’m like a person You’ll never be, and you’re like a person I never was, never. 

—from “The Time of the Ice Box”

 My thoughts were of myself: I’m coming to save you. I’m coming, Gus. You won’t hurt any more . . . you’ll never hurt. 

 They will not accept the fact that choice is an illusion caused by the fact that future time-loci are hidden from those who advance sequentially along the time-stream one moment after the other in blissful ignorance. 

 Yesterday we watched the lightning strike the primordial chemical soup of the seas and saw the more complex chemicals being made that developed into the first life foms. We saw this single-celled life triumph over time and eternity by first developing the ability to divide into two cells, then to develope into composite, many-celled life forms. What do you remember about yesterday? 

 Time is an ocean, and events come drifting to us as randomly as dead animals on the waves. We filter them. We screen out what doesn’t make sense and admit them to our consciousness in what seems to be the right sequence. 

 ♫ Showed me a ticket for a Greyhound bus
Her head was lost in time
She didn't know who or where she was
And anyone that helps me is a real good friend of mi––i––ine ♫ 

 There must be some way to get to the Red Star. 

 Given the power to alter the future, have we the right to use it? 

 She was lean, though full enough in hips and firm breasts to please any man, and long-limbed, swan-necked, head proudly held. That head was dolichocephalic but wide across brow and cheeks, tapering toward the chin, with, a classically straight nose and a full and mobile mouth which was a touch too big for conventional beauty. Arching brows and sooty lashes framed large bright eyes whose hazel shifted momentarily from leaf-green to storm-gray. Her black hair, thick and wavy, fell past her shoulders; a white streak ran back from the forehead. Except for suntan, a dusting of freckles, a few fine wrinkles and crow’s-feet, a beginning dryness, her skin was clear and fair. He guessed her age as about equal to his. 

 When he was in Lilliput there was a war between the Lilliputians and another nation of little people—I forget what they called themselves—and Gulliver intervened and ended the war. Anyway, he researched the two countries and found they had once been one. And he tried to find out what caused so many years of bitter enmity between them after they split. He found that there had been two factions in that original kingdom—the Big Endians and the Little Endians. And do you know where that started? Far back in their history, at breakfast one morning, one of the king’s courtiers opened his boiled egg at the big end and another told him that was wrong, it should be opened at the small end! The point Dean Swift was making is that from such insignificant causes grow conflicts that can last centuries and kill thousands. Well, he was near the thing that’s plagued me all my life, but he was content to say it happened that way. What blow-torches me is—why. Why are human beings capable of hating each other over such trifles? Why, when an ancient triviality is proved to be the cause of trouble, don’t people just stop fighting? 

 The Timesweep program was a close parallel to the space sweep. The Old Era temporal experimenters had littered the timeways with everything from early one-way timecans to observation stations, dead bodies, abandoned instruments, weapons and equipment of all sorts, including an automatic mining setup established under the Antarctic icecap which caused headaches at the time of the Big Melt. 

 The historic personages we met at Mrs. Carston’s dinner table, like all the others we will meet on our journey into the past lived and breathed nearly a century and a half ago, when they never could have imagined that one day soon their scattered bones would be harvested by black hands. Now revisited in their actual surroundings, they will do and say exactly what they actually did and said once upon a time. 

 No, no, no. I suppose it’s simply a logical impossibility to change the past, same as it’s logically impossible for a uniformly colored spot to be both red and green. 

 “It looked like Detroit after the union nuked Ford,” Phil said. “Only much, much worse.” 

 I circled her for some time then, she turning slowly in the basket to follow the motion of my plane, and we talked as well as we could with gestures and smiles. 

 I have come unstuck in time. 

 HE APPEARS ON THIS SPOT IN THE ANNUAL INSTANTS IN WHICH HIS COURSE INTERSECTS OUR PLANET’S ORBIT AND HE IS APPARENTLY ABLE TO TOUCH THE GROUND IN THOSE INSTANTS. 

 “Do you like me? I’m attractive, am’t I?” She opened the blanket to look at herself. “I mean, am I attractive to you? Oh, Dovy, s-say something! I’ve come so far, I chartered three jets, I, I,—Oh, Dovy d-darling!” 

 The Time Chamber. with its loose-hanging power cables and confused-looking control panel, didn’t look much like Mr. Wells’ crystal bicycle. 

 “Yes,” said Jherek. “I have already met the time-traveller. Last night. At the Duke of Queens’. I was so impressed by the costume that I made one up for myself.” 

1. 1. An Alien Heat, Oct 1972 Dancer Trilogy 1
2. 2. The Hollow Lands, 1974 Dancer Trilogy 2
3. 3. Pale Roses, 1974 in New Worlds 7
4. 4. The End of All Songs, Jul 1976 Dancer Trilogy 3
5. 5. White Stars, Mar 1975 in New Worlds 8
6. 6. Ancient Shadows, Nov 1975 in New Worlds 9
7. 7. Legends from the End of Time, 1976
        aka Tales from the End of Time includes 3,5,6
    
8. 8. Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming, Feb 1977
        aka A Messiah at the End of Time Expands Constant Fire
    
9. 9. The Dancers at the End of Time, 1981 includes 1,2,4
10. 10. Elric at the End of Time, Sep 1981 in Elsewhen
11. 11. The Murderer’s Song, Aug 1986 in Tales/Forbidden Planet

 Our time travellers, once they have visited the future, are only permitted (owing to the proerties of Time itself) at best brief returns to their present. 

 “Go ahead, (now + n),” he tells me. ((To him I am (now + n). To myself I am (now). Everything is relative; n is exactly forty-eight hours these days.)) 

 So what did you do, bring back the results of the Centauri Probe? Kill your grandmother? 

 Boys: ♫Meet three sisters,
Girls: Now meet their brothers,
Marcia: Greg’s the leader and a good man for the job.
Jan: There’s another boy, by the name of Peter,
Cindy: The youngest one is Bob.
Boys: See our sisters: They’re all quite pretty.
Greg: First there’s Marcia, with her eyes a sparklin’ blue.
Peter: Then there’s Jan, the middle one, who’s really groovy,
Bobby: And sister Cindy, too.
Boys: Let’s get set now, for action and adventure, as we see things we never saw before.
Girls: We’ll meet Mop Top and Ping and Pong, the pandas, and Marlon who has voices by the score.
All: The Brady kids, the Brady kids, it’s the world of your friends the Brady kids!♫ 

 These safaris into the past cost approximately a million dollars a minute. After a few brief journeys to verify the Crucifixion, the signing of Magna Carta and Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, the government-financed Einstein Memorial Time Centre at Princeton was forced to suspend operations.
Plainly, only one other group could finance further explorations into the past—the world’s television corporations. 

 You know, Joe, you are my first reader! A pity you don’t remember my book a little better! 

 The instructions were on the back of the clasp—when I touched it lightly, the words TIMEBELT, TEMPORAL TRANSPORT DEVICE, winked out and the first “page” of directions appeared in their place. 

1. The Guy with the Eyes (Feb 1973) Analog
2. The Time-Traveler (Apr 1974) Analog
3. The Law of Conservation of Pain (Dec 1974) Analog
4. Two Heads Are Better Than One (May 1975) Analog
5. Unnatural Causes (Oct 1975) Analog
6. A Voice Is Heard in Ramah . . . (Nov 1975) Analog
7. The Centipede’s Dilemma (1977) in Crosstime Saloon
8. Just Dessert (1977) in Crosstime Saloon
9. The Wonderful Conspiracy (1977) in Crosstime Saloon
10. Dog Day Evening (Oct 1977) Analog
11. Mirror/rorriM off the Wall (Nov 1977) Analog
12. Fivesight (Jul 1979) Omni
13. Have You Heard the One . . .? (Jun 1980) Analog
14. Pyotr’s Story (12 Oct 1981) Analog
15. Involuntary Man’s Laughter (Dec 1983) Analog
16. The Blacksmith’s Tale (Dec 1985) Analog
17. The Mick of Time (May 1986) Analog
18. The Paranoid (from Lady) (Winter 1988) in Pulphouse: Issue Two
19. Callahan’s Lady (1989) 11 connected stories
20. Lady Slings the Booze (1991) aka Kill the Editor
21. The Callahan Touch Mary’s Place book
22. The Immediate Family (Jan 1993) Analog
23. The End of the Painbow (Jul 1993) Analog
24. Off the Wall at Callahan’s 1994
25. Callahan’s Legacy (1996) collection of quotes
26. Post Toast (circa 1996) USENET group alt.callahans
27. Callahan’s Key (2000) new novel
28. Callahan’s Con (2003) new novel
29. Too Hot Too Hoot (from Legacy) (Oct 2006) in This Is My Funniest

 And as Callahan refilled glasses all around, the time traveler told us his story. 

 I made you say that. 

1. The Planet That Went Ape and its sequels (Mar 1973)
2. Superduperman: The Movie (Jul 1979)
3. Bleak for the Future (Jan 1986)
4. Peggy Got Stewed and Married (Apr 1987)
5. Star Blecch IV: The Voyage Bombs (Jun 1987)
6. Bleak for the Future Part II (Jun 1990)
7. Iterminable Too Misjudgment Day (Jan 1992)
8. Groundhog Deja Vu (Sep 1993)
9. Star Blecch: Worst Contact (Dec 1996)
10. Corntact (Nov 1997)
11. Planet of the Remakes (Nov 2001)
12. Interminable 3 Rise of the Bad Scenes (Aug 2003)

 For some reason which will never be satisfactorily explained, I have been transported back in time to 1960! I must remember that I’m now eighteen and not forty-three! It’s great to be young again and be back in the good old days when I had nothing to worry about except SAT’s . . . and acne . . . braces . . . and being flat chested and living with insensitive parents . . . and . . . hey, get me out of here and back to the present! 

—from Peggy Got Stewed and Married

 I don’t want to seem cynical. You may be my ten-times-removed egg-father or something, but right now it’s awfully hard not to believe you’re just a run-of-the-mill aberrant. I mean, here you crawl into my office close to midnight, spread yourself down, and then calmly announce you’re a traveler from the future. 

 I wouldn’t get bogged down in the details right now. The thing to focus on is that ’ve come here to save you from a horrible fate. 

—“All the Way from the Future World”

 This sad little lizard told me he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh, people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply. 

 As a trial, I’ll just pull the future lever a short ways. 

 You see, Dad and Lewis are trying to get it together, to secretly transfer a lot of young people into the future, bypassing the eco-crisis or whatever it is. Start a new civilization. 

 And Myron Castleman would be permitted to lie forever, piling up experiences and memories, but each of only an hour’s duration, each resumed at 12:01 PM on this balmy spring day in Manhattan, standing outside near the Grand Central Tower. 

 Captain’s Log, Supplemental: When we were in the time vortex, something appears to have changed the present as we know it. No one aboard recognizes Mr. Spock. The only answer is that the past was—somehow—altered. 

 A new sound came; in the blurred distances, something moved. Vaguely seen, a huge face looked over him and made soft, deep clucking noises. Then he understood. 

 Just think, Doctor, the time barrier broken at last. This puts you up there with Albert Einstein! Isaac Newton! Leonard Nimoy!! 

 Jack looked at Hornby solemnly. “You invented a time machine, did you?”
   “Long ago.” Hornby smiled amiably and filled his glass again. “Better than the ones those amateurs at Stanford rigged up. I’ve destroyed it, though. Lost interest.” 

 Every man has more to live for than every other man. I don’t have a cute chick to sleep with, but I’d like to see the semi’s rolling along the Riverside Freeway at sunset a few more times. It’s not what you have to live for; it’s that you want to live to see it, to be there—that’s what is so damn sad. 

 Humphrey did mind, naturally, but there was nothing he could do about it. Here was the chance to go up to the Lodge, probably to go inside it, and he was being counted out. But he did what he had to do with fairly good grace and said that he would stay. 

 “D-dark?” he stammered. “I’ll switch on the light.” 

1. The Man Who Asked for Yesterday (31 Jan 1974) to the previous day
2. Yesterday’s Murder (27 Jun 1974) heroine redoes her life
3. Come Back with Me (2 Jul 1975) hero relives favorite times
4. Assassination in Time (26 Sep 1975) to Lincoln’s assasination
5. The Lap of the Gods (25 Nov 1975) sea captain in the 1820s
6. A Connecticut Yankee . . . (8 Jan 1976) to Camelot
7. There’s No Business Like (19 Jan 1976) to 2076
8. The Covered Bridge (23 Mar 1976) a feminist to the 1770s
9. Time Killer (5 Apr 1976) before Great Depression
10. Future Eye (19 Jul 1976) 2976 detective to 1976
11. Now You See Them, Now You Don’t (12 Mar 1977) back from World War V
12. A Point of Time (15 Nov 1977) overthrow dictator in 2200
13. The Time Fold (16 Mar 1978) from 1979 to far future
14. Time Out of Mind (18 May 1978) to World War II
15. The Winds of Time (16 Oct 1978) heroine secures closure
16. The Time Box (18 Feb 1980) to the 1880s
17. The Man of Two Centuries (29 Apr 1981) Huron travels centuries
18. The Old Country (24 Mar 1982) back to World War II

 This is our bicentennial year: a time to pause and count our blessings. And among the greatest of these are the men and women of letters who flourished in our native land, who created a literature that was both typically American and universally admired. 

—host E.G. Marshall in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

 All the coordinates are there, all the places and times I went to these past months. When you're lonely, when you need me, go to the Time Station and I’ll be waiting on the other side. 

1. The Old Die Rich (7 May 1974) sleuth forced into time machine
2. The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway (July 1976)    art critic from 25th century
3. An Imbalance of Species (July 1976) from “A Sound of Thunder’

 Stay tuned now for excitement and adventure in the world of the future! Entertainment for the entire family produced right here in Kalamazoo. 

 A time machine has fallen into a clump of birch just above the little pond back of the machine shops. 

 We knew we’d pull back someone from the Harvard Physics Department, because we’re here in the building right now. But it could have been just anyone. We might have found ourselve questioning a college freshman . . . Or a scrubwoman . . . Or even a tourist visiting the lab. 

 “No true Eloi should be able to read or write.” Mr. Wells puffed on his pipe, peering out of the window. 

 The one calling himself Cochrane is not of this era, but of a time far forward. 

 He lit a cigarette and leafed through the cards and minutiae that constituted his identity in the outside world. Well . . . knowing himself, his driver’s permit would be up-to-date and all credit cards unexpired. The year was 1970. Another look outside: autumn. So he was thirty-five, and the pans clattered at the hands of Judy. 

 If you’re talking about time-tours, why don’t you come with us? We’re going to see the Cruxifiction. 

 Columbus: But, say, what time is it?
Kermit: Oh, it’s about, ah, 1492. 

 Twenty-four hours after I left her, I knew I was wrong and knew what I should have said. 

 “Pleasta Meetcha, Bob. Likewise, Sarah. Call me, uh . . .“ The only twentieth-century language in which Three-phasing’s name makes sense is propositional calculus. “ George. George Boole.” 

 Mr. Shaw rallied. “No, no, thank you, frog in my throat. I’m all right. Really pleased to meet you, too. I’m ah – it’s just that – oh, look here, I’m having a hard time taking all this in. I mean, Susan’s told me an incredible story about herself and you –” 

 Nothing was for certain, anything could change (depending on your point of view), and almost anything could happen, especially to forgetful old men who often found themselves in the wrong century rather than on the wrong street. 

 She was strange, remote, and beautiful, and she called herself “Hare.” 

1. Getting Away (Jan 1976) Galaxy
2. Predators (Oct 1976) The Ideas of Tomorrow
3. To 1966 (Spring 1977) Chacal
4. Spectator Sport (Jul 1977) Amazing
5. The Maw (Jul 1977) F&SF
6. Time and Hagakure (Winter 1977) Asimov’s
7. Where or When (Jan 1991) Asimov’s
8. The Glowing Cloud (Jan 1992) Asimov’s
9. Now That We Have Each Other (Jul 1992)   Asimov’s
10. One Kansas Night (Jun 1994) Asimov’s
11. Living It (Aug 1994) Asimov’s
12. Staying in Storyville (Dec 2006) in When or Where
13. Life’s Work (Dec 2006) in When or Where
14. The Here and Now (Mar 1998) Asimov’s

 What do you want me to do? Go back and find out where Captain Kidd buried his loot? 

—“Getting Away”

 For your information, medical historians have been digging into that puzzle for years without any luck at all. So unless somehow—miraculously—you have discovered Dr. Henderson’s diaries in the last couple of hours . . . 

 That the first inventor of a workable time machine was a science fiction enthusiast is by no means a coincidence. 

 Thomas James Lloyd, straw hat raised in his left hand, his other hand reaching out. His right knee was slightly bent, as if he were about to kneel, and his face was full of happiness and expectation. A breeze seemed to be ruffling his hair, for three strands stood on end, but these had been dislodged when he removed his hat. A tiny winged insect, which had settled on his lapel, was frozen in its moment of flight, an instinct to escape too late. 

 I didn’t say that we could or should go back to pre-industrial technology. The changes since then were inevitable and irreversible. I only said . . . 

 He didn’t seem to fit in at all well with the modern decor of the place, but I got the key from him and went towards the lift. 

 Commonplace, if somewhat grim, unsocial event known as a necktie party. The guest of dishonor, a cowboy named Joe Caswell, just a moment away from a rope, a short dance several feet off the ground, and then the dark eternity of all evil men. Mr. Joe Caswell who, when the good Lord passed out a conscience, a heart, a feeling for fellow man, must have been out for a beer and missed out. Mr. Joe Caswelll, in the last quiet moment of a violent life. 

—Opening narration of the Twilight Zone episode

1. Child of the Sun (Mar 1977) Analog
2. The End of the World    (Jan 1984) Analog
3. Man of the Hour (Oct 1984) Analog
4. Mother of the Year (Apr 1985) Analog
5. Touch of the Match (Feb 1985) Analog
6. Will of the Wisp (May 1985) Analog
7. Crisis! (May 1986) fix-up novel

 But each time you intervene, no matter how subtly, you change the future from which you came. You exist in this time and outside of time and in the future, and so each change makes you forget. 

 Mister . . . I don’t know who you are, where you came from, or where you got them fancy guns . . . but I want t’thank God and San Houston f’r sendin’ ya! My name’s Crockett . . . and before you got here, I thought fro sure I’d wake up tomorrow shakin’ hands with th’ devil! 

 I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,&rdauo; things can get out of hand. 

 In the weeks since the whole business of the time changes started, I had not been this close to being caught since that first day in the cabin northwest of Duluth, when I had, in fact, been caught without knowing what hit me. 

 I find your lack of faith disturbing. 

 Dr. Isaac Asimov
Director: Thiotimoline Research Foundation
Trantor MA31416 

 Did nobody ever finish one of these, ah, time machines? 

 He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at light-speed across unseen prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator. 

 The tatoo was obviously her social security number, but it was preceded by an “A” and followed by a space and five additional digits. 

1. Title Publication
2. Floodtide (Nov 1977) in Weird Heroes 8
3. Orion (1984) incorporates “Floodtide”
4. Vengeance of Orion (1988)
5. Orion in the Dying Time (1990)
6. Orion and the Conqueror    (1984)
7. Orion among the Stars (1995)
8. Legendary Heroes (Dec 1996) Dragon Magazine
9. Orion and King Arthur (2012)

 But even from this distance I could see she was the gray-eyed woman I had known in other eras; the woman I had loved, thousands of years in the future of this world. The woman who had loved me. 

—“Floodtide”, reprinted in the March 1983 Analog

1. The Protector (10 Dec 1977) The All New Super Friends Hour
2. The Time Trap (30 Sep 1978) Challenge of the Super Friends
3. New Kids in Town (31 Oct 1998) Superman
4. The Savage Time (9 Nov 2002) Justice League
5. Day of the Dark Knight! (2 Jan 2009) Batman: The Brave and the Bold   
6. Staring at the Future (30 Oct 2013) Teen Titans Go!

 It is the fifth century, A.D., the place is Britain, and I am Merlin Ambrosius. 

—“The Day of the Dark Knight!”, Episode 4 of Batman: The Brave and the Bold

1. Backspace (Winter 1977) enter the backspace button
2. Balancing Act (16 Feb 1981) editing Pete’s bloopers and more
3. Backup System (26 Oct 1981) Sam’s death causes backspacing
4. Wrong Number (21 Dec 1981) aliens v. Russia

 My friend Sam is the only person I know who edits events. Which is to say, he does something in his head and the past changes; the alterations, of course also reflect into the present and the future. 

—“Backup System”

 To the Reader of this Work:
In submitting Captain Carter’s strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest.
My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father’s home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack. . . .
very sincerely yours,
Edgar Rice Burroughs 

—from the foreward to A Princess of Mars

 Here, at last, was the man in Grandma Bran’s wedding picture in the hall. 

 But never go back. Never tamper. Never alter the past. 

 Never again—never, never again—do I take travel hints from Ray Bradbury! Huh! Him and his short cuts! 

 “I built it,” said Kelly, not without pride.
“What for?” I asked. “Time Travel?” I sneered.
“Yes,” he said. 

 Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can’t do. Maybe they have abilities we don’t have. . . . 

 Swimming strongly on my way back to what the sage called the remote future, my form began to flow and change according to time pressure. Sometimes my essence was like steam, sometimes like a mountain. 

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)
3. Life, the Universe and Everything (1982)
4. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)
5. “Young Zaphod Plays It Safe” (1986) in The Hitchhiker’s Quartet
6. Mostly Harmless (1992)
7. And Another Thing . . . (2009) by Eoin Colfer

 For instance, at the very moment that Arthur Dent said, “I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far, far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space, to a distance galaxy where strange and war-like beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle. 

—from the 4th radio episode

 He went through every moment, every step, every ragged breath, every slow, wading, stumbling yard through the cold water to the beach. And it all felt the same, as though he were just a spectator. The shell exploded. Staefler died a second time. 

 Before Jaxom could remind Ruth that they weren’t supposed to go between time, they had. 

 Anything you can do to expediate the publishing of Vahl’s story will be most appreciated, so that he will feel free to return to his own time. 

 Having learned early of the dangers attendant upon being unable to move the Time Machine, I had added to its structure a set of wheels and a driving chain attached to the pedals originally meant simply as foot rests. In short, I converted it into a Time Velocipede. 

 For what seemed like hour upon hour they arrived. Some by strange, grotesque vehicles. Some by spectacularly announced projection. Some by chronion gas, or drugs, or spiritual exercise, or by sheer mental power. Some involuntarily. Some unknowingly. At one point not far inland from the beach, across the first row of dim, ugly dunes, there suddenly appeared an entire city. 

 Faust and Mephistopheles entered the tavern and shed their heavy overcoats. 

  . . . but in all the lines I’m big, tough, and smart enough to know how to take good orders and not hear bad ones. 

 Our passenger is the object of popular cults by now—a focus for finer feelings. In this way his mere presence has drawn the world’s peoples closer together, cultivating respect and dignity, pulling us back from the brink of war, liberating tens of thousands from their concentration camps. These cults extend from purely fashionable manifestations—shirts printed with his face, now neatly shaven in a Vandyke style; rings and worry-beads made from galena crystals—through the architectural (octahedron and cube meditation modules) to life-styles themselves: a Zen-like “sitting quietly, doing nothing”. 

 Wait! I have one last request! I would like to die with dignity, with honor, . . . and with my penny-loafers on. 

 We can’t be sure how accurate our estimates of time and place are, but you seem to resonate with someone in London in 1871. 

 For us, approximately eight Terrestrial years have passed. It turns out that the T-machine is indeed a time machine of sorts, as well as a space transporter. The Betans—the beings whom we followed—calculated our course to bring us out near the date when we left. 

 We’ll arrive on Orel before they leave and stop them. 

 So I told him.
From beginning to end (well not end, I didn’t tell him of his own funeral) and tried to leave nothing out that was pertinent to the plan. I didn’t know what else to do. The year 1939 may have been ready for Buck Rogers or Brick Bradford and his Time Top, but was it ready for the hard, cold reality of time travel? 

 In tonight’s Classics Illustrated presentation, a young scientist hurtles the barrier of time and finds himself locked in a struggle to prevent the destruction Earth in the world of the future—an exciting new version of H.G. Wells’s masterpiece, The Time Machine. 

 This may sound pompous, but . . . I wish to know whether or not there is a God. 

 In times of fear and confusion, the job of informing the public was the responsibility of the Daily Planet, a great metropolitan newspaper whose reputation for clarity and truth had become the symbol for hope in the city of Metropolis. 

 “You’re angry because I stayed in fifteenth-century Italy so long?”
“I’m not especially mad,” you answered, growling. “but the Time Travel Overseeing Community wasn’t much pleased. You shouldn’t have dropped in on Leonardo da Vinci with those tips on aerodynamics.’ 

 One of these traversed the Channel at an angle of exactly ninety degrees, and to walk across it was no different from crossing any bridge across any ordinary river.
One bridge was built slightly obtuse of the right-angle, and to cross it was to climb the temporal gradient of the flux-field; when one emerged on the other side of the Channel, twenty-four hours had elapsed.
The third bridge was built slightly acute of the right-angle, and to cross to the other side was to walk twenty-four hours into the past. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow existed on the far side of the Flux Channel, and one could walk at will among them. 

 In 1979, . . . both are faster. 

 Eat your heart out Harry Jones! 

 Their only dreams are of winning prizes on television giveaway shows. 

 “Oh, well—” He runs his pasty white hands through hispockets while Cole and the girl do the same. “I have a candy bar or two, I believe,” and he brings them out. “Cole, you have a bottle, don’t you?"
The guy with the black hat scowls at him, but brings a flask out of his hip pocket and lays it on the table. 

 I felt angry. I wanted to show that kid, but there wasn’t anything I could show him, with the possible exception of sentence structure. 

 She was behaving towards him, literally, as if he had been in two places at once . . . as if, this morning, he had met her and told her of the escape plans he had only half started to form a few minutes ago! 

 Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels—perhaps the cause of them. 

 In my storage case were volumes for his perusal—a concise history of the world through the year 2000, a selection of the greatest poets since the master, selected volumes of Shakespearean criticism, and the massive one-volume Armstead Shakespeare, the definitive Shakespeare, published in 1997. 

 It was embroidered with scenes from the ancient past of Castle Roogna and its environs, eight hundred years ago. 

 Ninety years ago I was a freak; today I am an amateur. 

—Jack the Ripper in the twentieth century

 The fabric of time is a delicate, almost whimsical thing. Our success rate runs at nearly eight-two percent, and within the industry that is an enviable rate. But we just can not guarantee success. 

 Now shall one king rise up against another. And there shall be bloodshed throughout the whole world, fighting between the devil, his kingdom, and the kingdom of light. 

1. Mandalay (Oct 1979) Asimov's
2. Out of Service (Jul 1980) Asimov's
3. Slowly By, Lorena (Nov 1980) Asimov's
4. Intersections (26 Oct 1981) Asimov's

 Clever people he worked for.
But not clever enough to preven the Fracture, when Augustan Romans had tumbled into the waters of the Spanish Main and bandannaed urban guerillas shot the hell out of the Sun King’s palace at Verasilles. Not clever enough to point the way to Homeline, except as a hundred-kilometer march from line to line through a hexagonal sewer in Space₄. 

—“Mandalay’

 It traverses Time—Time past, Time to come, Time that could have been and Time that might yet be. It goes on forever, so far as I know, and no one knows all of its turnings. 

 Although the secret of death has been imparted to the full membership of the Temple, not all have understood its import. 

 There exists but one node of time/future open within the range of our frames. You must go there and prepare the way for our exodus. Else, the supernova shall extinguish us all.