Alternities, Inc.

by John M. Ford

Release: October 1979
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

I read the first of Ford’s stories in which a small group of men and women, ever hopeful of finding their Homeline, march through a narrow tube where hatches to alternate worlds and alternate times appear every 100 kilometers. I think that most of the Earthlike worlds have a corporation—Alternities, Inc.—which has tried to turn a profit on the tubes.

Clever people he worked for.

But not clever enough to preven the Fracture, when Augustan Romans had tumbled into the waters of the Spanish Main and bandannaed urban guerillas shot the hell out of the Sun King’s palace at Verasilles. Not clever enough to point the way to Homeline, except as a hundred-kilometer march from line to line through a hexagonal sewer in Space₄.

DEBUT

“Alternities, Inc.,” in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October 1979.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

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