Planet Earth rolled on in ever decreasing circles around the sun. As it had been carrying on in this fashion for more years than anyone cared to remember, there seemed no cause for immediate alarm. Not that things were exactly a bundle of laughs down on old terra firma at the present time, oh dear me, no. Things had never been quite the same since, in a moment of gay abandonment, outgoing US president Wayne L. Wormwood had chosen to press the nuclear button just as the New Year bells were gaily chiming in the arrival of the twenty-first century.This generally unwele turn in events had caught 　

　　　　Dusk was beginning to creep down from the mountains when the Witchfinder rode into Craiglowrie. His hunched position in the saddle of the black mare disguised his true height, yet all the same he was tall and terrible, the features beneath the dark broad-brimmed hat seemed like those of a sun-bleached skull from a distance. The grimace that revealed black and broken teeth; the eyes that glowed with the fire of a personal hatred, and seemed to search out each and every one of the peasants who trembled and watched behind the windows of their tumbledown bothies.　　　　They remembered the last t　

　On July 16, in the aching torpid heat of the South Florida summer, Terry Whelper stood at the Avis counter at Miami International Airport and rented a bright red Chrysler LeBaron convertible. He had originally signed up for a Dodge Colt, a sensible low-mileage pact, but his wife had told him go on, be sporty for once in your life. So Terry Whelper got the red LeBaron plus the extra collision coverage, in anticipation of Miami drivers. Into the convertible he inserted the family-his wife Gerri, his son Jason, his daughter Jennifer-and bravely set out for the turnpike.　The children, who liked 　

　　Introduction　　Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly twelve million square miles, Africa is almost as large as North America and Europe bined. It is nearly twice the size of South America. As we mistake its dimensions, we also mistake its essential nature: the Dark Continent is mostly hot desert and open grassy plains.　In fact, Africa is called the Dark Continent for one reason only: the vast equatorial rain forests of its central region. This is the drainage basin of the Congo River, and on　

JACK LIGHTS OUTCHAPTER 1The Alhambra Inn and Gardens1　　　　On September 15th, 1981, a boy named Jack Sawyer stood where the water and land e together, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking out at the steady Atlantic. He was twelve years old and tall for his age. The sea-breeze swept back his brown hair, probably too long, from a fine, clear brow. He stood there, filled with the confused and painful emotions he had lived with for the last three months-since the time when his mother had closed their house on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and, in a flurry of furniture, checks, and real-estate a　

Disclaimer　　　　　　There is more than one reason why the Crown finds this overimaginative work most unacceptable.　　　First and foremost, of course, is that it purports to be about a planet called "Earth" and no such planet exists under that name or its pretended astrographic designation of Blito-P3. Admittedly, it has been cleverly created down to characters and locations. That is the precise danger for the unsuspecting reader.　　　It is also claimed that "Earth" is on the Invasion Timetable and thus scheduled for capture. The Timetable bequeathed by our ancestors has the status of Divine mand. It 　

　　　As usual, I am indebted to a variety of people for their help and input in writing this volume. Not the least of whom is Master Robinton (aka Frederic H. Robinson) who was quite upset that I had ended his life so abruptly. I would suspect it of a tenor, but for a baritone to insist on another encore is almost unheard of. But I have recently been asked - via the impressive Del Rey Website - to explain certain facts which had not previously been brought to light anent Pern pre-Dragon flight history. As Robinton had a fine Pernese hand in most of it, it behoves me to tell the story from his v　

　On a ridge above Texas Flat upon a rock shaped like flame, a hand moved upon the lava. The hand moved and then was still. In all that vast beige-gray silence there was no other movement and no sound.　A buzzard swinging in lazy circles above the serrated ridge had glimpsed that moving hand. Swinging lower, he saw a man who lay among the rocks atop the ridge. He was a long-bodied man in worn boots and jeans, a man with wide shoulders and a lean tough face.　It was the face of a hunter but now of a man hunted. A man who lay with his rifle beside him and who wore a belted gun; but the man still l　

　　　　It was humid inside the small laboratory in spite of the window which was open contrary to all regulations. Outside the sun shone and, but for the absence of foliage on the trees surrounding the squat grey stone buildings which prised the Midlands Biological Research Centre, one would have been forgiven for assuming that summer had already begun. Small birds twittered incessantly as they busied themselves searching for twigs and dry grass with .which to plete the building of their nests. Rooks circled and cawed noisily above a line of tall elms. Another cycle of life had begun.　　...　

　　At midmorning of a broiling summer day the life of Three Counties Hospital ebbed and flowed like tide currents around an offshore island. Outside the hospital the citizens of Burlington, Pennsylvania, perspired under a ninety-degree shade temperature with 78 per cent humidity. Down by the steel mills and the rail yards, where there was little shade and no thermometers, the reading-if anyone had bothered to take it-would have been a good deal higher. Within the hospital it was cooler than outside, but not much. Among patients and staff only the fortunate or influential escaped the worst of t　

　Saturday night, Coconut Grove.　It was the usual scene: thousands of people, not one of whom a normal person would call normal.　There were the European tourists, getting off their big fume-belching buses, wearing their new jeans and their Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts, which they bought when their charter bus stopped in Orlando. They moved in chattering clots, following their flag-waving tour directors, lining up outside Planet Hollywood, checking out the wall where famous movie stars had made impressions of their hands in the cement squares, taking videos of each other putting their palms in the e　

　　　　　　She was sitting there at her glass, at the fashionable going-out hour, trying to decide between a cluster of crystal grapes and a live gardenia as a shoulder decoration, when someone knocked at the suite door, outside across the adjoining reception room.　　Whatever her decision was in the matter, she knew it would have a city-wide effect. It meant that for the next few weeks hundreds of young women would either all be wearing clusters of crystal grapes or live gardenias.　　It was hard to believe that just a couple of brief years ago no one had cared a rap what she stuck on her shoulder. N　

IBill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and wine-barrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different. But he did hear it and droppe　

　　THE GUILLOTINE; brutal instantaneous bloody death, a hellish instrument of execution. It dominated the white-tiled room, a. metallic structure that gleamed evilly in the stark fluorescent light.　　　　Louis Nevillon was calm as his guards allowed him a few seconds to savour his fate. They were gloating, he could read it in their smug, supposedly impassive, expressions. Even the priest. Tete-de-chien! The executioner was masked, a custom that went back centuries, but there was a gleam in the pale blue eyes that stared out of the cloth slits that was unmistakable. It was Gallon, of course. Who e　

Many a blond, northern moonrise,like a muted reflection, will softlyremind me and remind me again and again.It will be my bride, my alter ego.An incentive to find myself. I myselfam the moonrise of the south.　　-Paul Klee, The Tunisian Diaries　　Prologue　　It was just past midday, not long before the third summons to prayer, that Ammar ibn Khairan passed through the Gate of the Bells and entered the palace of Al-Fontina in Silvenes to kill the last of the khalifs of Al-Rassan.　　Passing into the Court of Lions he came to the three sets of double doors and paused before those that led to the garde　

　On the fine, bright morning in early May when the whole sensational affair of the Gwytherin relics may properly be considered to have begun, Brother Cadfael had been up long before Prime, pricking out cabbage seedlings before the day was aired, and his thoughts were all on birth, growth and fertility, not at all on graves and reliquaries and violent deaths, whether of saints, sinners or ordinary decent, fallible men like himself. Nothing troubled his peace but the necessity to take himself indoors for Mass, and the succeeding half-hour of chapter, which was always liable to stray over by an