Time in Advance

A reprint of a story first published in February 1952 and featured as that issue's cover story. Here, Earth is visited by enigmatic and uncommunicative aliens who ignore humans and simply observe. Those who do meet with the aliens, gain extraordinary powers, such as telekinesis, but in human terms, also go mad. Algernon Hebster is a highly successful businessman, owing mostly to his dealings with primeys, who supply him with the knowledge for advanced technologies which he puts to use in commerce. The problem is that primeys are so dangerous that dealing with them is highly illegal and every attempt is made to confine them to the reservations around their perceived alien masters.

This story was published in the August 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. The story presents a future in which citizens serve out sentences for crimes they have not yet committed. Two "pre-criminals", "Blotto" Otto Henck and Nicholas Crandall, manage against all the odds to serve out two full terms for murder in an off-world penal colony. They are returned to Earth as minor celebrities with the right to kill one person each.[1]

This story first appeared in the November 1955-dated issue of Infinity Science Fiction. In the story, Earth finds itself on the brink of nuclear war between Russia and the United States. As a last-ditch symbolic gesture of peace and cooperation, the two nations launch a joint crewed venture to Mars. After finding an alien city there, a Russian and then American astronaut first come down with a sickness, then gain superhuman power.

Front cover of a Russian edition of "Winthrop Was Stubborn".

A story first published in Galaxy Science Fiction in August 1957, under the title "Time Waits for Winthrop". The future, via time travel, contacts the present. The present day travelers find themselves stranded in a hedonistic future. The oldest, Winthrop, refuses to return to the past thus leaving all of them trapped. In the present he was a bum, but in the future he's a curio and encouraged to indulge his tastes to the point of gluttony.[2]