Buck knelt in the dust and sliced a carrot into a half-gallon can. He held the carrot with the stump of his left arm and his thighs as he deftly cut the slices with a worn picket knife...

The first nine years of my life were spent in a big walled house in China. Since we were considered to be of the upper class, my grandparents never allowed me outside to play with other children...

I crept out of town with the late afternoon traffic as it unclotted itself from the intersections...

They were just sitting there. Two old men, just sitting there in front of the pool hall. Two rumpled and unshaven old men, sitting in front of the pool hall, watching the Saturday night crowd move by...

It was two a.m. Sunday morning. In the operations control room of Continental Command, a hundred feet below the facades of the Pentagon, Major William J. Higgins, Duty Officer, sat at his desk and studied the hourly reports from the scanning stations as they flashed on the screen in front of him...