CHAPTER SIX The target showed at about 150 meters, through a gap in the thornbush. My seven gun settled naturally against my shoulder and recoiled almost at the same instant. There was no report. LaChoy’s hushers were the best you can buy, and he didn’t want gunshots to disturb the area…

CHAPTER FIVE Toward morning it got cold. I could smell it, though the tents of LaChoy’s camp were set to keep us sleeping warmly at a temperature decided as human optimum in an election I don’t recall. There was frost whiskering the long safari grass when I got outside. The Rongor…

CHAPTER FOUR In the iced waning of the night, Python stirred in the Medfac creche, caught between nightmare and awakening, his unconscious mind haunted by the invading processional from another time, another place. Always it began with the voice, imprinted on some inner level of awareness all those weary kilometers ago…

After a contract dispute with Doubleday over my second novel, and another editor’s refusal to buy a novella I was sure was the best thing I ever wrote, I was done with science-fiction. I started in on “straight” fiction, a novel and various short stories. A famous literary agency that…

Once Corinne got the hang of driving, it was like dope to her. She couldn’t get enough of it. That was fine with me, because it meant I could buy a six-pack and just sit in the passenger seat and ride. One thing that I had loved to do ever…

Once we knew that we would be working after August, my taking Corinne home got to be an understood thing. Nobody yet had started making remarks like they always do about anything at all between a man and a woman, no matter how innocent. We talked about Dawson’s chances of…

Looking back now, it still seems strange about how it started with Corinne. I was over forty. She had just turned thirty, even if she looked almost like a teenager, still kind of rounded out and baby-fat soft with those big brown eyes and that sleek chestnut hair in a…

We moved to North Florida the summer after the hotel in Saint Petersburg found out about Christine’s TB and let me go. I had my state health card and there was nothing wrong with me and they knew it, and Chris had been in the Lake City sanatorium for most…

Denver, 3:30–5 pm MDT Fernando Ruiz steered his twenty-year-old pickup into the Adobe Hacienda Motel near the Denver rail station with the usual pained screech from the power-steering pump. The steering wheel stuttered against his capacious belly, which grumbled in reaction to mouth-watering odors filling the cab. The insulated pizza-delivery bag on the seat…