The University sprawled casually, unashamed of its disordered ranks, over a hundred thousand acres of grassy, rolling countryside. It was the year A.D. 3896, and the vast assemblage of schools and colleges and laboratories had been growing on this site for more than two thousand years. It had survived political and industrial revolutions, local insurrections, global, inter-terrestrial and nuclear wars,... more...

CHAPTER I. MALBROUCK S'EN VA-T'EN GUERRE. "So adieu, Jack, until we meet in Quebec! You have the start of us, report says, and this may even find you drinking his Majesty's health in Fort Carillon. Why not? You carry Howe, and who carries Howe carries the eagles on his standards; or so you announce in your last. Well, but have we, on our part, no vexillum? Brother Romulus presents... more...

Along one of the most precipitous of the many Rocky Mountain trails a man and a woman climbed slowly one spring morning. The air was cold, and farther up the mountains little patches of snow lay here and there in the hollows. Two or three miles below them nestled one of the most famous pleasure resorts of the entire region. Three or four times as distant lay the nearest town of any importance. Over the... more...

CHAPTER I Outside there was shimmering heat and dry, thirsty sand, miles upon miles of it flashing by in a gray, barren blur. A flat, arid, monotonous land, vast, threatening, waterless, treeless. Its immensity awed, its bleakness depressed. Man's work here seemed but to accentuate the puny insignificance of man. Man had come upon the desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles... more...

INTRODUCTION THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the... more...

Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . . Beyond Ventura B there was no life; there was nothing but one worn out sun after another, each with its retinue of cold planets and its trail of dark asteroids. At least that was what the books showed, and the books had been written by men who knew their business. Yet, despite the books... more...

FACT SHEET Defense Nuclear AgencyPublic Affairs OfficeWashington, D C. 20305 Subject: Project TRINITY Project TRINITY, conducted by the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), was designed to test and assess the effects of a nuclear weapon. The TRINITY nuclear device was detonated on a 100-foot tower on the Alamogordo Bombing Range in south-central New Mexico at 0530 hours on 16 July 1945. The nuclear yield... more...

CHAPTER I. THE LONE PASSENGER That evening the down train from London deposited at the little country station of Ramsdon but a single passenger, a man of middle height, shabbily dressed, with broad shoulders and long arms and a most unusual breadth and depth of chest. Of his face one could see little, for it was covered by a thick growth of dark curly hair, beard, moustache and whiskers, all overgrown... more...

CHAPTER I The scene was Dean Street, Soho, and this story opens on a snowy winter night in the January of 1888. The modern improvements of Shaftesbury Avenue were as yet unmade, and the foreign district of London had still to be opened up. A cold north wind was blowing on the few pedestrians whom necessity, or some urgent obligation, had compelled to tramp the pavements laden with snow. A few cabs and... more...

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOOD There were once a King and Queen, who were very unhappy at not having any children, more unhappy than words can tell. Vows, pilgrimages, everything was tried, but nothing was of any avail; at length, however, a little daughter was born to them. There was a splendid christening. For godmothers, they gave the young Princess all the fairies they could find in the... more...