It always did this. Time after time and time after time. Well, it was time. That was problem really. Dr Karz Flembold took his hand out of his pocket and poked it out of the temporal bubble; he saw a second immediately tick past on the clock face of his Casio.

He whipped his hand back in, feeling the sting of the present like a burn on the skin of his fingers. The watch immediately froze again. 15:04:21. It always was. But yet, he knew, time was still there. He had seen the world around him crumble and fall away,...

Tigger was not just any old Maine Coon Cat. He was *the* Maine Coon Catt. It was perhaps a lengthy code name for a spy but he liked it all the same.

He unfolded the small piece of paper that had been folded up inside the sole of the shoe he had just been handed at the dry cleaners.

"Distract the Family Dog Captain," it read.

Tigger knew the Family Dog and knew that distracting him from his important task of manning the security barrier that led from the A Zone into Second Street and beyond would not be easy....

Safura M Bhapavit had believed that the secret of eternal life had lain in discovering a relationship between religion and science. He had scoured his native India, from tropical south to mountainous north, in search of evidence that would lead him to the human being who most closely represented God, or Buddha, or however one choose to express it. The longing for this eternal life, Safura argued, must have its roots in the tangible and the real, despite centuries of confusion and myth.

He found Jane as he getting out of a taxi at Heathrow Airport, ready for the next...