Nelson and Ramos sped on toward Mars in their tiny plastic-bubble spacecraft. They were on the alert it didn't pay to take anything for granted in the Big Vacuum The way between the worlds was mostly empty space except for the outlaws of the void who drifted, patiently and vengefully waiting for a victim, then struck! Nelsen and Ramos tensed blips on the radar screen! Maybe meteors.
Writers have long dreamed of a plot machine, but the machines in Script-Lab did much more than plot the story--they wrote it. Why bother with human writers when the machines did the job so much faster and better?
Astro has managed to talk Tom and Roger into coming to Venus for summer vacation. He's got perfect summer work for the three of them: he's got a little business hunting down tyrannosauri and selling the carcasses to restaurants. But stranger stuff than dinos is on the horizon: before they even leave the station for Venus, they're caught in a bombing, and it'll lead them into the thick of the Venetian resistance... !
At 4 a. m., a ray of light had been observed on the disc of the planet Mars in or near the "terminator"; that is to say, the zone of twilight separating day from night. The news was doubly interesting to me, because a singular dream of "Sunrise in the Moon" had quickened my imagination as to the wonders of the universe beyond our little globe, and because of a never-to-be-forgotten experience of mine with an aged astronomer several years ago.
Dal Timgar had always wanted to be a doctor. As a Garvian and the first non-human to study medicine on Hospital Earth, he must face enormous adversity from classmates, professors, and some of the highest ranking physicians on all of Earth. Will his efforts be enough to earn him the Silver Star of a Star Surgeon.
In my position as head inspector in the FPD department at Washington, urged on by the desire, which has always been very strong in me, to investigate and understand everything which is mysterious, I naturally became much interested in these remarkable occurrences. And as I have been employed by the government in important affairs and secret missions since I was a lad, it also happened naturally that the head of my department placed In my charge this astonishing mysterious investigation.
The colony "world" is a poverty stricken agricultural society with only two exports: the fermented products of their world's unique grapes, and the salvaged war equipment, now selling at about 1% of its true value. The legend of MERLIN, the super-computer said to have planned the grand strategy which successfully concluded the war. "If we could only find Merlin," the inhabitants said to each other, "all our problems would be solved.
