PREFACE
It may be one of the oldest dreams of all—to step through a door and find yourself in a different time or a different place . . . or a different world. Somehow, enclosing yourself in a rattling, stuffy, claustrophobic time machine for a long flight back through the ages is just not the same. To have a gate open before you and to take one step forward and suddenly be Elsewhere or Elsewhen! To stroll between the ages or between the worlds! To step to Ancient Greece, or the far future, or to a world circling a distant star, or to the New York of the Roaring Twenties, or to the age of the dinosaurs, or on to a Civil War battlefield just before the fateful charge, or to a different reality altogether, an alterate reality where you might perhaps encounter an alternate you ... just to suddenly be there, without having to journey through time or space, without fuss or bother, everything and everywhere no further away and no more difficult to get to than it is to step from your kitchen to your living room. Surely of all the freedoms that humankind has dreamed of for itself, there can be no freedom more complete and more liberating than this.
So open the pages of this anthology and let the stories here be your gates through time and space to mysterious new worlds that you thought were forever unreachable. Let the authors you'll find within these pages be your tour guides through the infinite vistas of time and space—they'll take you as far as the imagination can reach and bring you back alive!
The gates are opening before you. Go ahead, take that first step .. .