It's a rare day when Terrans meet eye-to-eyestalk with the slimy little sticky-fingers - er, that is to say, the noble alien Groaci. This time the races clash on the planet Popu-Ri, once the home of a mighty interstellar power. Popu-Ri has sunk into decline...but its ancient treasures remain. Though not for long, if the Groaci have their way. Groaci also finds Popu-Ri just the place to build a galactic warfleet. Still, for the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne to respond would threaten the delicate balance of human/Groaci forces on the cocktail circuit. Therefore the ambassador must keep the lid on by doing nothing. But how to do nothing without seeming an inneffectual pantywaist? Send an observer! Yep, the Ambassador has it all figured out. But he made one little mistake; he sent Retief...

Mankind was at war with the hideous Gool...and losing. Then, beyond Ganymead, one man fought the searing brain probe of an alien spy...and won. He mastered the power of its telepathic mind-control, captured the secret of its matter transmitters, and learned how to destroy the Gool Overlords. He called intelligence with news of the victory and headed home. Straight into a barrage of Terran nuclear warheads. Past missiles, shells, and assassins, he made it home - alone, badly wounded, and branded a traitor by conventional Terran wisdom that said no one could survive the Gool brain probe. No one, that is, except a brainwashed puppet deliberately allowed to survive to serve the Goos as a spy. But he must survive Earth's attempts to kill him - because no matter how much his fellow humans want him dead, he knows that he is the only one who can lead them against the Gool and have a chance at victory.

The twenty-seventh century planet of Quopp is a world where Earthmen walk cautiously or not at all. The inhabitants are weirdly diabolical creatures, possessing spoked-wheel limbs and sprouting steel-sharp talons. Plans are afoot to place these singular beings under a single government friendly to Earth. But Jame Retief, officer of the distinguished Corps Diplomatique Teresstienne, a supra-national organization devoted to keeping the peace, has discovered that evil forces are undermining the whole scheme. Deviously sincere, uncompromisingly venal, fearlessly cowardly, Retief goes to work against mounting planetary intrigue and more than once brings those around him to the brink of nervous collapse.

It starts out as a weird but seemingly understandable assignment, bodyguarding a mad politician whose keepers have decided to let him "escape" as a sort of reality therapy. But to understand the Senator, Florin must enter the Machine, an reality will never be the same. From now on he's a Knight of Delusions.

Even after the set had been turned off, the TV blared the announcement: "Citizens of Earth, I am Tersh Jetterax. It is my pleasure to announce to you that a new government has taken over the conduct of all public affairs." And thus the US was in the hands of the Monitors, the strangely polite yellow-clad beings whose powers were such that they could render everyone helpless - without shedding one drop of blood. Who are they? The Russians? An alien race from another planet?

'TWAS BORING IN ARTESIA ...or so thought Sir Lafayette O'Leary, ex-craftsman from Earth, and now seemingly ex-interdimensional swashbuckler extraordinaire as well. His battles were all won, his dragons all slain and life was just the same boring round of riches, royal hunts and regatas. Boring, boring, boring; until he walked past the azalia... Suddenly Artesia was gone, and O'Leary was trapped in Melange, a world of giants and pirates, karate-chopping hags and electronic flying carpets, a world where goons and harlots are the spitting images (literally!) of his own aristocratic Artesian associates. And because they think he's his double, lots of his new friends want O'Leary dead. Unless he can get through the interdimensional gate and find the continuum path back home, O'Leary's life will never be boring again. Just short.

BLINDING LIGHT, NOISE BEYOND SOUND - A JOURNEY INTO NOTHINGNESS... Imperial Intelligence Agent Brion Bayard was catapulted into nothingness by an unknown force and woke to find himself in a universe not his own. Surrounded by hulking, cannibalistic ape men who called themselves Hagroon, Bayard was soon entrapped in a web of time lines. He found himself running from the Hagroon into the arms of Dzok, the educated monkey man of Xonijeel; transported by Dzok to a universe where Napoleon the Fifth was in power and left there to the tender powers of the beautiful witch Olivia; struggling with the bonds of a fictitious past, always striving to regain his lost universe of Zero-zero Stockholm so he could bring the warning which might save his world from sudden, violent death...