At five o'clock Ed Loyce washed up, tossed on his hat and coat, got his car out and headed across town toward his TV sales store. He was tired. His back and shoulders ached from digging dirt out of the basement and wheeling it into the back yard. But for a forty-year-old man he had done okay. Janet could get a new vase with the money he had saved; and he liked the idea of repairing the foundations himself.
An old woman comes to Mars because a fraudulent travel agent offers a "trip to heaven". She and other members of her traveling group find an extremely battered and derelict rocket which was supposed to be used for the last part of the trip. And it is used for that trip, in a pretty literal sense.
Allan Stern and his secretary Beatrice Kendricks awake in New York City, one thousand years after an asteroid destroys most life on earth. Now they find a bi-plane, that Allan can make run on alcohol and begin the search for other survivors. They encounter a great rent in the earth which they are unable to fly across. They end up in the Abyss and meet up with a tribe of white haired albinos who still speak a type of English.
The starways' Lone Watcher had expected some odd developments in his singular, nerve-fraught job on the asteroid. But nothing like the weird twenty-one-day liquid test devised by the invading Steel-Blues.