What everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, ’sixty-two, all the clocks stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and forty-six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we figure is somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

“Well, if you must know,” he said, “she's broken the engagement.” This didn't get us any farther. We had assumed as much. You don't go calling people rats if love still lingers. “But it's only an hour or so,” I said, “since I left her outside a hostelry called the ‘Fox and Goose’, and she had just been giving you a rave notice. What came unstuck? What did you do to the girl?”

The electronics is the difference between a modern and an old-fashion thermostat.

At the far end of the houses the head gardener stood waiting for his mistress, and he gave her strips of bass to tie up her nosegay. This she did slowly and laboriously, with knuckly old fingers that shook.