Messages from the Sun — Tom Henighan

Explorers search for the abominable snowman as the world moves toward catastrophe. A woman sells her child in a market, then tries to get him back. A house becomes a puzzling cosmos for an alienated couple. A bionic man longs for his lost treasures. A small town is haunted by aliens from Algol . . . Fourteen stories to delight you and set you thinking by a past-master of contemporary fantasy. These stories transport the reader to worlds touched by strangeness but occupied by people very much like ourselves. Snared by the fine silk sheets of those Parisian and Swiss hotels, he enjoyed a succession of female bodies that became springboards carrying him into the cold, fiery regions of intimate space. There he could spin on a wheel of pleasure, always circling around a face that the final climax was destined to obliterate forever. (From Massenet) Harris is simple: his memory is DiMaggio. He acquired a set of ancient baseball cards and began to study them. Then one day he walked down the ramp and landed on the other world, found himself in the bleachers, at the old Yankee Stadium. It's a legend, that place . . . And as part of the legend there was Joltin' Joe, a tall, casual figure in pinstripes. He was patrolling the outfield just twenty-five or thirty yards away from where Greg was sitting. You should have heard my friend tell about it. (From Dream Planets)