The Revolving Boy

The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg
Del Rey, 1980
Originally published by Doubleday, 1966
Price I paid: 90¢

From early childhood, Derv Nagy was marked out as being different. His uncanny sense of direction, his compulsion to turn and turn again until he felt somehow right, and the slight but definite slant at which he stood—all set him apart. Only his parents knew why Derv was unique among Earth’s billions—and they were determined that their son would never learn the truth.

Eventually Derv realized that his personal “compass” was oriented toward a world far distant from the one he had grown up on—but he did not know of the mysterious transmissions emanating from that invisible point in the sky…

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The Ayes of Texas

The Ayes of Texas by Daniel da Cruz
Del Rey/Ballantine Books, 1982
Price I paid: 90¢

It was 1994, but Gwillam Forte was an entrepreneur of the old school. Twenty-three disabled Veterans needed a reason to live, so he gave them a rusty hulk—the battleship U.S.S. Texas—and unlimited funds to make her beautiful and seaworthy in time for Independence Day, 2000.

But the world changed quickly and for the worse. By 1998, the Texas and her supermodern weapons were needed for duty far more important than guarding the National Monument in which she rode at anchor.

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The Empire of Time

The Empire of Time by Crawford Kilian
Del Rey/Ballantine Books. 1978
Price I paid: 90¢

Jerry Pierce was the Intertemporal Agency’s most experienced operative, a seasoned time-traveler on the old subway train that whisked him back and forth through the ages. He’d already altered history by directing the Turkish conquest of Constantinople four centuries ahead of schedule and garrotting an obscure Mongol chief before the man became a problem. But his biggest difficulty lay ahead of him

Seventy-four years ahead, to be exact.

Somehow, someway—nuclear war, alien attack, no one really knew—Earth was going to be destroyed and left a lifeless cinder. It was every Intertemporal agent’s goal to find out how and to prevent disaster. But suddenly the problem had become Pierce’s special assignment. And just as suddenly, the man for all ages had been mentally blocked from knowing what was going on. What he didn’t know was that he was now programmed to kill—and was being pushed to the end of the world….

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