Whitney and Tommy Leighton are more than they appear to be. The twins were born in our dimension, but it wasn't just a birth. It was a rebirth. They originated in a another dimension that runs along the same parallel as ours. In the other world, Whitney is a Baran-Dok-Toi Prim warrior, and Tommy is a Prectock, but they know nothing about that. Other than the strange dreams that Tommy is beginning to have.
It seemed Earth was a rich, and undefended planet in a warring, hating galaxy. Things can be deceptive though; children playing can be quite rough--but that ain't war, friend!
Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself... without anyone.
Eight students of telepathy go mad and their instructor is a vegetable. That makes the instructor the perfect person to work out the bugs in his system.
When the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club find themselves lacking any urgent assignments at the close of the Civil War, their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes that they build a gun big enough to launch a rocket to the moon. But when Barbicane's adversary places a huge wager that the project will fail and a daring volunteer elevates the mission to a "manned" flight, one man's dream turns into an international space race.