TOURNAMENT UNDER NIGHTMARE SKIES When Kit Temple was drafted for the Nowhere Journey, he figured that he'd left his home, his girl, and the Earth for good. For though those called were always promised "rotation," not a man had ever returned from that mysterious flight into the unknown. Kit's fellow-draftee Arkalion, the young man with the strange, old-man eyes, seemed to know more than he should. So when Kit twisted the tail of fate and followed Arkalion to the ends of space and time, he found t

When the first strong sunlight of May covered the tree-arched avenues of Center City with green, the riots started. The people gathered in angry knots outside the city hall, met in the park and littered its walks with newspapers and magazines as they gobbled up editorial comment at a furious rate, slipped with dark of night through back alleys and planned things with furious futility. Center City's finest knew when to make themselves scarce: their uniforms stood for everything objectionable at t

Three-score men sit in the crowded, smoke-filled room. Some drink beer, some squat in moody silence, some talk in an animated fashion about nothing very urgent. At the one small door, two guards pace back and forth slowly, creating a gentle swaying of smoke-patterns in the hazy room. The guards, in simple military uniform, carry small, deadly looking weapons. FIRST MAN: Fight City Hall? Are you kidding? They took you, bud. Don't try to fight it, I know. I know. SECOND MAN: I'm telling you, there

"Hey, looka me. I'm flying!" "Will you get your big fat feet out of my face?" "Sure. Show me how to swim away through air, I'll be glad to." "Leggo that spoon!" "I ain't got your spoon." "Will you look at it float away. Hey spoon, hey!" "Watch this, Charlie. This will get you. I mean, get you." "What are you gonna do?" "Relax, chum." "Leggo my leg. Help! I'm up in the air. Stop that." "I said relax. There. Ha-ha, lookit him spin, just like a top. All you got to do is get him started and he spins

"Petrovitch, S. A.!" called the Comrade standing abreast of the head of the line, a thin, nervous man half a head shorter than the girl herself. Sophia Androvna Petrovitch strode forward, took a pair of trim white shorts from the neat stack at his left. "Is that all?" she said, looking at him. "Yes, Comrade. Well, a woman. Well." Without embarrassment, Sophia had seen the men ahead of her in line strip and climb into the white shorts before they disappeared through a portal ahead of the line, de

The trouble with the Stalintrek, Sophia thought, was that it took months to get absolutely nowhere. There had been the painful pressure, the loss of consciousness, the confinement in this tight little world of dormitories and gleaming metal walls, the uncanny feeling of no weight, the ability—boring after a while, but interesting at first—to float about in air almost at will. Then, how many months of sameness? Sophia had lost all track of time through ennui . But for the first brief period of ad

"What a cockeyed world," said Alaric Arkalion Sr. to his son. "You certainly can't plan on anything, even if you do have more money than you'll ever possibly need in a lifetime." "Don't feel like that," said young Alaric. "I'm not in prison any longer, am I?" "No. But you're not free of the Nowhere Journey, either. There is an unheralded special trip to Nowhere, two weeks from today, I have been informed." "Oh?" "Yes, oh. I have also been informed that you will be on it. You didn't escape after

It could have been a city in New England, or maybe Wisconsin. Main Street stretched for half a mile from Town Hall to the small department store. Neon tubing brightened every store front, busy proprietors could be seen at work through the large plate glass windows. There was the bustle you might expect on any Main Street in New England or Wisconsin, but you could not draw the parallel indefinitely. There were only men. No women. The hills in which the town nestled were too purple—not purple with

"You got to hand it to Temple's kid brother." "Yeah. Cool as ice cubes." "Are you guys kidding? He doesn't know what's in store for him, that's all." "Do you ?" "Now that you mention it, no. Isn't a man here who can say for sure what kind of environmental challenges he'll have to respond to. Hypno-surgery sees to it the guys who went through the thing won't talk about it. As if that isn't security enough, the subject's got to be a brand new arrival!" "Shh! Here he comes." The brothers Temple ent

His name was Temple and it was the year 1960. Christopher Temple had problems. He had his own life, too, which had nothing to do with the life of the real Christopher Temple, departed thirty-odd years later on the Nowhere Journey. Or rather, this was Christopher Temple, living his second E.C.R.... Temple who had lost once, and who, if he lost again, would take the dreams and hopes of the Western world down into the dust of defeat with him. But as the fictional (although in a certain sense, real)

"It's all so big! So incredible! We'll never understand it! Never...." "Relax, Sophia. Arkalion said—" "I know what Arkalion said, but we haven't learned anything yet." Hours before, Arkalion had landed them on the space station, a gleaming, five-mile in diameter globe, and had quickly departed. Soon after that they had found themselves in a veritable labyrinth of tunnels, passageways, vaults. Occasionally they passed a great glowing screen, and always the view of space was the same. Like a magn