Science Fiction ....

Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. The Volcano that had reared Taratua up from the Pacific depths had been sleeping now for half a million years. Yet in a little while, thought Reinhold, the island would be bathed in fires fiercer than any that had attended its birth. Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who had appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul. I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. The Time Traveler (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before. Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep into his bones. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scru- tinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert. Once it had known change and alteration, but now time passed it by. Night and day fled across the desert's face, but in Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came. There was a wall. His wife had held him in her arms as if she could keep death away from him. He had cried out, "My God, I am a dead man!" This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying ... but nobody thought so. The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by cannon fire. I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect - and tax - public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. In the night time heat of Beirut in one of a row of general address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality. I looked at my notes and I didn't like them. I'd spent three days at U.S. Robots and might as well have spent them at home with the Encyclopedia Tellurica. My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male. His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.