Book description
An adventure of the near future - brought on by a catastrophe in the
far future. On a summer's day like any other, holes appeared in the air
and people from nowhere walked through them into our world. They came,
and they kept coming, until they numbered in the millions. They said
they came from the future - they were our children's children. They said
there was trouble "up there".They knew they were a terrible
burden on our economy, and all, but - well, we couldn't just let them
starve, could we? Then more facts became apparent. The "holes in
the air" were time tunnels, one-way tunnels from the future. The
trouble up there was in the form of alien creatures - ravening beasts
with teeth, claws, and tentacles, that reproduced like bacteria and were
intelligent. They were utterly uncontrollable and so our children's
children fled through the time tunnels, which, they claimed, were
securely guarded. The beasts, whatever or whoever they were, couldn't
get through. So they claimed. But then somebody up there slipped and the
beasts were abroad. Clifford D. Simak (1904 -1988) Clifford Donald
Simak was born in Wisconsin, in 1904. He attended the University of
Wisconsin and spent his working life in the newspaper business. He
flirted briefly with science fiction in the early '30s but did not start
to write seriously until John W. Campbell's Astounding Stories began to
rejuvenate the field in 1937. Simak was a regular contributor to
Astounding throughout the Golden Age, producing a body of well regarded
work. He won the Nebula and multiple Hugo Awards, and in 1977 was the
third writer to be named a Grand Master by SFWA. He died in 1988.
