It had been virtually shattered by two inventions, which were, ironically enough, of purely human origin and owed nothing to the Overlords. The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive: the...
However much the universe and its mysteries might call him, this was where he was born and where he belonged. It would never satisfy him, yet always he would return. He had gone half-way across the Ga...
He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it without enthusiasm. The name on the label—SPACETASTIES—was enough to put him off. And he had grave doubts about the promise printed undern...
Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board 'Mentor'. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control;...
Even a doomed man might reasonably be expected to take some slight interest in a few thousand square meters of gems. He
During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora’s box. The forces th...
Curnow had once remarked that Dr. Chandra had the sort of physique that could only be achieved by centuries of starvation.
Bose was slightly less happy about the presence of Conrad Taylor, the celebrated anthropologist, who had made his reputation by uniquely combining scholarship and eroticism in his study of puberty rit...
Atheism is unprovable, so uninteresting. However unlikely it is, we can never be certain that God once existed—and has now shot off to infinity, where no one can ever find him… Like Gautama Buddha, I...
And just fifty years had separated the Wright Brothers from the first jet airliners.
And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, Good-bye.
And in its sky was such a sun as no opium eater could ever have imagined in his wildest dreams. Too hot to be white, it was a searing ghost at the frontiers of the ultraviolet, burning its planets wit...
Alvin was an explorer, and all explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.
Almost any seat was comfortable at one-sixth of a gravity.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA.ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.
A man who grows that much hair,' critics were fond of saying, 'must have a lot to hide.
One day, somebody had predicted, Earth would have a ring like Saturn’s, composed entirely of lost bolts, fasteners, and even tools that had escaped from careless orbital construction workers.)
Like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.
Fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few millise...
An expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: Wormholes in space.