Galactic Horrors

On a dead world beyond the last navigation beacons, an alien city is still at work. Ten-foot beings sow fields of dust with empty hands, walk grooves their feet have worn knee-deep into solid rock, and sit on the steps of a great hall with the calmest faces a veteran surveyor has ever seen. Inside that hall stand rows of bone-white frames.

He is here on a black ex...

Two winters ago, something escaped from the laboratory at a secret army research station deep in the northern pines. The scientists vanished the same night. Officially, they are away on fieldwork, and the army now fills the station with punished men.

On his first night there, a storeman stripped of his stripes for selling his own soldiers' boots is cut from elbow ...

Every time the truck stops, whoever is standing nearest its back doors begins to slow. Words drag. Faces sag. Then they fall flat and sink into the asphalt, and they keep sinking.

The cargo is a warm grey stone the size of a fist, heavy enough to bend the light around it, resting on a stack of steel plates it is slowly falling through. The man paid to haul it has ...

For twenty-two years, an aging captain has fished the rings of a sea that drains endlessly into a vast hole past the horizon, where the catch grows richer the closer a boat dares to go. Each time he comes up short, the cannery that owns his trawler rivets another iron plate to her bow, and the newest one now sits at the waterline. One more short season will cost him his boat....

For two decades he has torn apart dead frontier colonies, and each one died of something he could dig up: a bad well, a burst dam, a hillside that came down in the dark. Every one except the farm town where half the town slid sideways across flat ground overnight and stopped as neatly as a train at a platform.

Six years later, the believers who stayed behind send ...