It was the same old rigmarole. Sometimes I found it amusing; sometimes it only bored me; sometimes it gave me a pronounced pain, especially when I had had more of Wolfe than was good for either of us.　　This time it was fairly funny at first, but it developed along regrettable lines. Mr. Jasper Pine, president of Naylor-Kerr, Inc., 914 William Street, down where a thirty-story building is a shanty, wanted Nero Wolfe to e to see him about something. I explained patiently, all about Wolfe being too lazy, too big and fat, and too much of a genius, to let himself be evoked. When Mr. Pine phoned again, in the afternoon, he insisted on speaking to Wolfe himself, and Wolfe made it short, sour, an　

PART ONETheTurning WheelEnd of PART ONE1Tears and SmokeTiamak found the empty treelessness of the High Thrithing oppressive. Kwanitupul was strange, too, but he had been visiting that place since childhood, and its tumbledown buildings and ubiquitous waterways at least reminded him a little of his marshy home. Even Perdruin, where he had spent time in lonely exile, was so filled with close-leaning walls and narrow pathways, so riddled with shadowy hiding places and blanketed in the salt smell of the sea, that Tiamak had been able to live with his homesickness. But here on the grasslands he felt tremendously exposed and utterly out of place. It was not a forting feeling....　

A MATTER OF MILLIONS　　THE Clipper smacked the blue of Biscayne Bay and settled into a lazy squat, from which it taxied toward a landing. An audible sigh of relief came from the roped-off crowd that lined the shore of Dinner Key. Little wonder that the sigh was heard, for the throng was immense.　　Seldom did the population of Miami, citizen and tourist, assemble en masse at the Marine Airways Base to witness the arrival of a Clipper plane. But the winged ship just in from the Caribbean was worthy of a huge turnout. Not only because its passengers were something of celebrities, but because of the cargo that they brought.　　The plane was in from Centralba, a Caribbean republic long establishe　

　I found what follows lying on my desk one morning.　As you will see, it appears to be the first-person story of a young woman, evidently beautiful and not unskilled in the arts of love.　According to her story, she appears to have been involved, both perilously and romantically, with the same James Bond whose secret-service exploits I myself have written from time to time.　With the manuscript was a note signed "Vivienne Michel," assuring me that what she had written was purest truth and from the depths of her heart.　I was much interested in this view of James Bond, through the wrong end of the telescope, so to speak, and, after obtaining clearance for certain minor infringements of the Offic　

　To　my gentle Reader　William Plomer　　PART ONE: HAPPENSTANCE　　CHAPTER ONE　　REFLECTIONS IN A DOUBLE BOURBON　　JAMES BOND, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.　It was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it. As a secret agent who held the rare double-O prefix - the licence to kill in the Secret Service - it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon. If it happened, it happened. Regret was unprofessional - worse, it was death-watch beetle in the soul.　And yet there had been something curiously impres　

　A heavy rain in Scotland had swollen the streams. As one of them subsided, a small bundle was left by the receding waters.　This bundle contained human flesh.　A search revealed more bundles. Some of them were found days apart. Apparently, many of them had been thrown from a bridge into the turbulent flood waters.　Nearly a month after the first discoveries, a left foot was found on the roadside some distance from the stream bed. Nearly a week later, a right forearm with hand was discovered.　All of the recoveries were, of course, in a state of advanced deposition.　When the pieces were assembled, it was found there were two heads which had been mutilated by removal of eyes, ears, nose, lips an　

　A RED-HAIRED GIRL　　THE residence of Mr. Peter Pett, the well-known financier, on Riverside Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expensive boulevard. As you pass by in your limousine, or while enjoying ten cents worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus, it jumps out and bites at you. Architects, confronted with it, reel and throw up their hands defensively, and even the lay observer has a sense of shock. The place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral, a suburban villa, a hotel and a Chinese pagoda. Many of its windows are of stained glass, and above the porch stand two terra-cotta lions, considerably more repulsive even than the placent animals which guar　

　　It was hot. The shallow place where I lay atop the desert ridge was like an oven, the rocks like burning coals. Out on the flat below, where the Apaches waited, the heat waves shimmered and danced. Only the far-off mountains looked cool.　When I tried to push out my tongue to touch my cracked lips it was like a dry stick in my mouth, and the dark splashes on the rock were blood ... my blood.　The round thing lying yonder with a bullet hole in it was my canteen, but there might be a smidgen of water left in the bottom - enough to keep me alive if I could get to it.　Down on the flat lay my sorrel horse, who had run himself to death trying to save my hide, and him with a bullet hole in his bel　

　 The Danger in Dreams　　 Thomas Covenant was talking in his sleep. At times he knew what he was doing; the broken pieces of his voice penetrated his stupor dimly, like flickers of innocence. But he could not rouse himself-the weight of his exhaustion was too great. He babbled like millions of people before him, whole or ill, true or false. But in his case there was no one to hear. He would not have been more alone if he had been the last dreamer left alive.　 When the shrill demand of the phone cut through him, he woke up wailing.　 For a moment after he threw himself upright in bed, he could not distinguish between the phone and his own flat terror; both echoed like torment through the　

　January 1954　　The Boeing C-97 Stratocruiser bore the look of a crypt. Perhaps the image was bred by the cold winter night, or perhaps it came from the gusting snow that was piling an icy shroud on the wings and fuselage. The flickering lights from the cockpit windshield and the fleeting shadows of the maintenance crew served only to exaggerate the chilling scene.　Major Raymond Vylander, United States Air Force, did not care for what he saw. He watched silently as the fuel truck drove away and vanished into the stormy darkness. The loading ramp was dropped from the rear of the great whalelike belly, and then the cargo doors slowly swung closed, cutting off a rectangle of light that spilled 　

Blood SportNews item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966:RAIN OF STONES REPORTEDIt was reliably reported by several persons that a rain of stones fell from a clear blue sky on Carlin Street in the town of Chamberlain on August 17th. The stones fell principally on the home of Mrs Margaret White, damaging the roof extensively and ruining two gutters and a downspout valued at approximately $25. Mrs White, a widow, lives with her three-year-old daughter, Carietta.Mrs White could not be reached for ment.Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow. On the surface, all the girls in the shower room were shoc　

　　THE SENIOR partner studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper. He had the brains, the ambition, the good looks. And he was hungry; with his background, he had to be. He was married, and that was mandatory. had never hired an unmarried lawyer, and it frowned heavily on divorce, as well as womanizing and drinking. Drug testing was in the contract. He had a degree in accounting, passed the CPA exam the first time he took it and wanted to be a tax lawyer, which of course was a requirement with a tax firm. He was white, and had never hired a black. They managed this by being secretive and clubbish and never s