A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the prose reads.
A relentlessly busy Wall Street broker finally pauses long enough to make a romantic gesture to his quiet stenographer.
Every Thanksgiving, a wealthy old man takes a homeless stranger to dinner, preserving a private tradition neither can bear to break.
A chance meeting in a city park lets two strangers imagine love beyond the boundaries of wealth and social rank.
A lonely baker imagines that a quiet customer is a struggling artist and finds a tender way to help him.
A hungry starship crew buys a hulking Martian animal, then learns its mind may be more civilized than their own.
A cuckoo clock takes sides in a failing marriage and refuses to behave like the possession its owner thinks he bought.
A dying professor lends his brain to an experimental warship, and the machine begins making decisions its creators never authorized.
When soldiers on a remote asteroid declare themselves plants, a psychiatrist enters the woods to find who taught them.
A major crosses a ruined battlefield to negotiate peace, unaware that the autonomous weapons around him have learned to look human.
Three Terran agents flee Mars with a stolen city hidden among office supplies, but one fellow passenger asks too many questions.
After eight years underground, three men risk the radioactive surface and find the robots fighting their war have kept a secret.
Explorers land on a dead planet and discover that one weapon has outlived the civilization it was built to defend.
A shopkeeper notices a corpse that his entire town ignores, then realizes being the only person alarmed may mark him as prey.
A condemned hunter is sent two centuries into the past to kill a religious founder, armed only with a gun and the target’s skull.
A Terran boy visits his alien friends on the day their people finally begin winning back a century of conquered worlds.
In a crime-free future, a pulp writer discovers that a perfect society has left him dangerously short of material.
Sixty years after being stranded on Mars, an old man receives a phone call from the younger self he recorded to survive the silence.
A grieving morgue-ship attendant recovers a scientist who has floated frozen through space for three centuries—and may hold the key to a war.
A burned-out coroner on a space morgue ship gets one last chance to confront the war whose dead he has carried for a decade.
After a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
Across peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
Seekers from several species travel to a machine that knows everything, only to learn that knowledge depends on asking a valid question.
An aging prospector on a remote asteroid gives his work robot a personality and gains the companion he never expected.
A man surrounded by labor-saving luxuries begins to question the debts that control his family’s future.
