Acknowledgements　Because, in some instances, I met many of the real people in positions which, of necessity, are in this novel, I wish to state that none of the characters drawn here in any way resemble their real-life counterparts who, without exception, were extremely helpful to me.　I would like to thank:　Dr Gita Natarajan, Associate Medical Examiner, City of New York　Lieutenant Jim Doyle, mander, Village Police, West Hampton Beach　and, especially:　Dr Michael Baden, former Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York　Thanks to the numerous individuals who assisted me with translations, and to my father, who proofed the manuscripts.　Special thanks to Ruth and Arthur for invaluable R&R in Sha　

　　By P. G. Wodehouse　　1　In a day in June, at the hour when London moves abroad in quest of lunch, a young man stood at the entrance of the Bandolero Restaurant looking earnestly up Shaftesbury Avenuea large young man in excellent condition, with a pleasant, good-humoured, brown, clean-cut face. He paid no attention to the stream of humanity that flowed past him. His mouth was set and his eyes wore a serious, almost a wistful expression. He was frowning slightly. One would have said that here was a man with a secret sorrow.　William FitzWilliam Delamere Chalmers, Lord Dawlish, had no secret sorrow. All that he was thinking of at that moment was the best method of laying a golf ball dead in fr　

　A sea of mist drifted through the cloud forest: soft, grey, luminescent. On the high ridges the fog showed brighter as the morning sun began to warm and lift the moisture, although in the ravine a cool, soundless dimness still counterfeited a pre-dawn twilight.　mander Cordelia Naismith glanced at her team botanist and adjusted the straps of her biological collecting equipment a bit more fortably before continuing her breathless climb. She pushed a long tendril of fog-dampened copper hair out of her eyes, clawing it impatiently toward the clasp at the nape of her neck. Their next survey area would definitely be at a lower altitude. The gravity of this planet was slightly lower than their ho　

　　　I am a vampire, and that is the truth. But the modern meaning of the word vampire, the stories that have been told about creatures such as I, are not precisely true. I do not turn to ash in the sun, nor do I cringe when I see a crucifix. I wear a tiny gold cross now around my neck, but only because I like it. I cannot mand a pack of wolves to attack or fly through the air. Nor can I make another of my kind simply by having him drink my blood. Wolves do like me, though, as do most predators, and I can jump so high that one might imagine I can fly. As to blood-ah, blood, the whole subject fascinates me. I do like that as well, warm and dripping, when I am thirsty. And I am often thirsty...　

　Kona Weather　　MISS MINERVA WINTERSLIP was a Bostonian in good standing, and long past the romantic age. Yet beauty thrilled her still, even the semi-barbaric beauty of a Pacific island. As she walked slowly along the beach she felt the little catch in her throat that sometimes she had known in Symphony Hall, Boston, when her favorite orchestra rose to some new and unexpected height of loveliness.　It was the hour at which she liked Waikiki best, the hour just preceding dinner and the quick tropic darkness. The shadows cast by the tall cocoanut palms lengthened and deepened, the light of the falling sun flamed on Diamond Head and tinted with gold the rollers sweeping in from the coral reef. 　

KINGDREAMCATCHERHodder & StoughtonGrateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the followingcopyrighted material:"Dying Man" (c) 1956 bv Atlantic Monthly Co. The Waking (c) 1953 by Theodore Roethke from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke bv Theodore Roethke, used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc."Scooby Doo Where Are You" by David Mook and Ben Raleigh (c) 1969 (renewed) Monk Bros. West & Ben Raleigh Music Co. All rights reserved o/b/o Mook Bros. West in the United States, administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights o/b/o Ben Raleigh Music Co. in the United States administered bv Wise Brothers Music LLC. All rights fo　

　Doyne Farmer and Alletta Belin, 1992　　There are many people, including myself, who are quite queasy about the consequences of this technology for the future.　K. Eric Drexler, 1992　　Introduction　Artificial Evolution in the Twenty-first Century　　The notion that the world around us is continuously evolving is a platitude; we rarely grasp its full implications. We do not ordinarily think, for example, of an epidemic disease changing its character as the epidemic spreads. Nor do we think of evolution in plants and animals as occurring in a matter of days or weeks, though it does. And we do not ordinarily imagine the green world around us as a scene of constant, sophisticated chemical warfare, w　

March 9, 1918Caribbean SeaThe Cyclops had less than one hour to live. In forty-eight minutes she would bee a mass tomb for her 309 passengers and crew a tragedy unforeseen and unheralded by ominous premonitions, mocked by an empty sea and a diamond-clear sky. Even the seagulls that had haunted her wake for the past week darted and soared in languid indifference, their keen instincts dulled by the mild weather.There was a slight breeze from the southeast that barely curled the American flag on her stern. At three-thirty in the morning, most of the off-duty crewmen and passengers were asleep. A few, unable to drift off under the oppressive heat of the trade winds, stood around on the upper de　

　Sao Paulo Airport, Brazil, 1991　　 With a POWERFUL KICK FROM ITS twin turbofan engines, the sleek executive jet lifted off the runway and shot into the vaulted skies above Sao Paulo. Climbing rapidly over the biggest city in South America, the Learjet soon reached its cruising altitude of thirty-nine thousand feet and raced toward the northwest at five hundred miles an hour. Seated in a fortable rear-facing chair at the back of the cabin, Professor Francesca Cabral peered wistfully out the window at the cottony cloud cover, already missing the smog cloaked streets and sizzling energy of her hometown. A muffled snort from across the narrow aisle interrupted her musings. She glanced over at t　

　work as a tribute to　Her Britannic Majesty,　Elizabeth II, to the people　of Her Crown Colony of　Hong Kong - and perdition to their enemies.　　　Of course this is a novel. It is peopled with imaginary persons and panies and no reference to any person or pany that was, or is, part of Hong Kong or Asia is intended.　I would also like to apologize at once to all Hong Kong yan - all Hong Kong persons - for rearranging their beautiful city, for taking incidents out of context, for inventing people and places and streets and panies and incidents that, hopefully, may appear to have existed but have never existed, for this, truly, is a story. ...　　June 8,1960　　PROLOGUE...　

　The solitary figure in the saffron robes shielded his eyes from the glare and squinted down the glacier to where the enormous black vessel lay, one-third submerged, in the floor of the valley. Allowing for the portion lost below the icy surface of the frozen lake it was easily some three hundred cubits long, at least fifty wide and another thirty high. It had, overall, the appearance of some fantastic barge with a kind of gabled house mounted upon its deck. Its gopher wood timbers were blackened by a heavy coating of pitch and hardened by the petrification of the glacier which had kept it virtually intact throughout the countless centuries. A great opening yawned in one side; several hundr　

　　　　The wind blew hard and joggled the water of the ocean, sending ripples across its surface.Then the wind pushed the edges of the ripples until they became waves, and shoved the waves around until they became billows.The billows rolled dreadfully high: higher even than the tops of houses.Some of them, indeed, rolled as high as the tops of tall trees, and seemed like mountains; and the gulfs between the great billows were like deep valleys.　　All this mad dashing and splashing of the waters of the big ocean, which the mischievous wind caused without any good reason whatever, resulted in a terrible storm, and a storm on the ocean is liable to cut many queer pranks and do a lot of damage....