Broom wakes in a haze with his memory shattered and his senses already telling him something has gone terribly wrong. Trapped in a strange room where ordinary-looking objects feel subtly false, he begins to piece together a nightmare of imprisonment, altered perception, and fear. As fragments of his conversation with Contarini return, he suspects the impossible: that time travel has hurled him far into the future and left his mind scrambled in its wake. Exploring cautiously, Broom touches walls that only seem wooden and confronts a humming machine beyond his understanding. When he looks outside, he is stunned by a vast night city of towering buildings and impossible bridges, dazzling in scale yet eerily empty. With no people in sight and the sense that he may be watched, he moves into the hallway, increasingly aware that this brilliant future world may be as dangerous as it is bewildering. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

À propos de l'auteur

Garrett, Randall

Randall Garrett was an American writer whose lively imagination and sharp wit helped make him a memorable voice in mid-century science fiction and fantasy. Born in 1927 and active during the genre’s golden age, he built a career in magazines and paperbacks, moving easily between space adventure, mystery, and humorous speculative fiction before his life was cut short in 1987. He became especially well known for stories that blended clever plotting with an affectionate, often satirical view of human folly, and he also earned a lasting place in readers’ minds through his inventive takes on alternate history, future societies, and magical or scientific systems. Across his work, Garrett returned again and again to themes of intelligence, adaptability, social absurdity, and the way ordinary people behave when confronted with extraordinary circumstances. Those concerns still feel fresh today, because his stories capture both the excitement of possibility and the comic weaknesses that make people recognizably human. His legacy endures in the way he helped show that speculative fiction could be both entertaining and intellectually playful, with room for suspense, irony, and genuine insight. Readers who enjoy fast-moving adventures, clever worldbuilding, and a touch of humor in their science fiction or fantasy are especially likely to appreciate him.