Fiction Books

CHAPTER ONE The Man in Gray The four-faced clock over the information booth on the Upper Level of the Grand Central Station in New York City showed exactly twenty-five minutes after three. Dave Dawson paused in his restless pacing up and down to look at it for the hundredth time in the last half hour. He glared at it, sighed heavily, and made noises deep in his throat. "Where is that Freddy Farmer... more...

1 To the world at large, of course, it was just another day. A different sort entirely at different places on the great, round, rolling Earth, but nothing out of the ordinary. It was Tuesday on one side of the Date Line and Monday on the other. It was so-and-so's wedding anniversary and so-and-so's birthday and another so-and-so would get out of jail today. It was warm, it was cool, it was... more...

We have before us a volume of autograph letters, chiefly of soldiers and statesmen of the Revolution, and addressed to a good and brave man, General Palmer, who himself drew his sword in the cause. They are profitable reading in a quiet afternoon, and in a mood withdrawn from too intimate relation with the present time; so that we can glide backward some three quarters of a century, and surround... more...

Albrecht and I went down in a shuttleship, leaving the stellatomic orbited pole-to-pole two thousand miles above Alpha Centauri's second planet. While we took an atmosphere-brushing approach which wouldn't burn off the shuttle's skin, we went as swiftly as we could. A week before we had completed man's first trip through hyperspace. We were now making the first landing on an... more...

In September, 1958, the author and two colleagues collected a large series of Pseudemys in small ponds and in a river in the basin of Cuatro Ciénegas, Coahuila. The specimens prove to represent a previously unrecognized subspecies of Pseudemys scripta. The subspecies is named in honor of Edward Harrison Taylor who has contributed more than any other person to our present knowledge of the herpetofauna... more...

CHAPTER I ON FURLOUGH IN THE OLD HOME TOWN "My son, Richard. He is home on his furlough from the MilitaryAcademy at West Point." Words would fail in describing motherly pride with which Mrs. Prescott introduced her son to Mrs. Davidson, wife of the new pastor. "I am very glad to meet you, Mr. Prescott," said Mrs. Davidson, looking up, for up she had to glance in order to see the face of... more...

CHAPTER I. In the Garden. There are certain days in the lives of each one of us, which come in their due course without special warning, to which we look forward with no anticipations of peculiar joy or sorrow, from which beforehand we neither demand nor expect more than the ordinary portion of good and evil, and which yet through some occurrence—unconsidered perhaps at the moment, but gaining in... more...

CHAPTER IAN INITIATION A brown dusk filled the long room, for although the windows were shrouded thickly and no lamp burned, some small ray of light percolated from without and made dimly visible the outlines of the company there gathered. The low, quavering notes of an organ sighed through the place. There was the rustle and movement of a crowd. To the neophyte, who had been brought into the hall with... more...

A WORD OF APOLOGY FOR MY TITLE. Before I begin my story, let me crave my reader's indulgence for a brief word of explanation, for which I know no better form than a parable. There is an Eastern tale—I forget exactly where or by whom told—of a certain poor man, who, being in extreme distress, and sorely puzzled as to how to eke out a livelihood, bethought him to give out that he was a great... more...

When I saw the little house building, an eighth of a mile beyond my own, on the Old Bay Road, I wondered who were to be the tenants. The modest structure was set well back from the road, among the trees, as if the inmates were to care nothing whatever for a view of the stylish equipages which sweep by during the summer season. For my part, I like to see the passing, in town or country; but each has his... more...