Strange histories and alternate futures feature in Volume 6 of the Collected Stories. Robert Silverberg's fertile imagination explores the consequences of an even more virulent Black Death in 1348 than the one our ancestors lived through; the woeful last days of a veteran archaeologist and his pact with the dead; the fortunes of a vagrant band of Crusaders in the New World; Henry James's eyewitness account of the War of the Worlds; a brilliant icy sheen over the Occupied Zone - and a spooky patch of darkness; the vanishing of the mighty capital of a great empire - and its reappearance as modern-day Chicago...and much more, including the only science fiction homage to J.R.R. Tolkien ever written.

This collection contains the following stories:

• Introduction
• Lion Time in Timbuctoo
• A Tip on a Turtle
• In the Cloud Zone
• Hunters in the Forest
• A Long Night's Vigil at the Temple
• It Comes and Goes
• Looking for the Fountain
• The Way to Spook City
• The Red Blaze is the Morning
• Death Do Us Part
• The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James
• Crossing into the Empire
• The Second Shield