On New Year’s Day, 1943, G. H. Bondy, head of the great Metallo-Electrical Company, was sitting as usual reading his paper. He skipped the news from the theatre of war rather disrespectfully, avoided ...

“I’ve been expecting you!” Marek repeated, when he had seated his guest in a comfortable leather chair. Nothing on earth would have induced Bondy to own up to his vision of the fallen inventor. “Just ...

G. H. Bondy felt rather as though he were dreaming. Marek settled him in an easy chair with quite maternal solicitude, and made haste to bring some brandy. “Here, drink this up quickly,” he jerked out...

G. H. Bondy sucked meditatively at his cigar. “And how did you find it out, old chap?” he asked at last. “By the effect on myself,” said the engineer, resuming his march up and down the room. “As a re...

About a fortnight after New Year’s Day, Marek was sitting in Bondy’s business office. “How far have you got?” Bondy had just asked, raising his head from some papers over which he was bending. “I’ve f...

“Gentlemen”⁠—it was G. H. Bondy addressing the meeting of the Board of Directors of the M.E.C. (the Metallo-Electrical Company) held on February 20th⁠—“I have to inform you that one building of our ne...

“How do we stand in London?” “M.E.C. shares were quoted at 1,470 yesterday. The day before yesterday they were 750.” “Good!” “Mr. Marek has been made an honorary member of ten learned societies, and i...

The dredge M.E.28 stood motionless in the evening twilight above Stechovice. The Paternoster shovel had long since ceased heaving up the cold sand from the bed of the Vltava River. The evening was mil...

Cyril Keval, district reporter on the staff of the Prague People’s Journal, hurried into evening-dress for the occasion and dashed off to Stvanice just after six o’clock in the evening, to write up th...

A few days after these occurrences G. H. Bondy was wandering through the streets of Prague, a cigar between his teeth, thinking things over. Anyone who met him would have thought that he was looking a...

Exactly how it happened has not yet been established, but just at the very time when the little factory belonging to R. Marek, Engineer, 1651 Mixa Street, Břevnov, was garrisoned by detectives and sur...

That youthful savant Doctor Blahous, Ph. D., only fifty-five years of age, and now Lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of Prague, rubbed his hands as he sat down before his quarto sheet...

And now permit the chronicler of the Absolute to call your attention to his painful situation. First of all, he is in the act of writing Chapter XIII, well aware that this unlucky number will have a f...

It has often happened to the chronicler (and surely to many of his readers) that when for any reason whatever he has gazed at the night sky and the stars, and realized with mute amazement their prodig...

Of course, in our own orderly and (one might well say) blessed times of general scarcity, we simply cannot imagine the social evil that boundless plenty could be. To us it seems that to find ourselves...

It was noon at the Hut in Bear Valley. Rudolf Marek sat curled up on the veranda; he looked at a newspaper, but he soon folded it up again, and gazed out over the far-stretching chain of the Giant Mou...

“Brother Senior Warden, what do you see in the East?” asked the Worshipful Master. He was dressed all in black, wore the white leather apron, and held the silver gavel in his hand. “I see the Masters ...

The largest Catholic or popular newspaper, The People’s Friend, had not a very large editorial staff, and so at 9:30 p.m. there were only two men in the room⁠—Kostal, the night editor (Heaven knows wh...

You will readily understand that the admission of the Absolute to the bosom of the Church afforded, under the given circumstances, a great surprise. It was carried out by virtue of the Papal Brief alo...

St. Kilda is a little island, practically nothing more than a rock of pliocene tufa far to the west of the Hebrides. A few stunted birches, a handful of heather and dry grass, flocks of nesting seagul...

Snow was falling in the mountains. All night through it had come down in great silent flakes; nearly two feet deep of it lay there new-fallen, and still the white starlets of snow floated earthwards w...

In the Prague office of the People’s Journal everyone was working at top speed. The telephone operator was yelling furiously into the telephone and quarrelling with the young lady at the Exchange. Sci...

By 11 p.m. the following telephonic communications had been received at the office of the People’s Journal:⁠— Czech Press Bureau. From Munich, 12th inst.⁠—According to the Wolff Telegraph Agency, the ...

Bobinet, if you please, Toni Bobinet, the twenty-two-year-old lieutenant of mountain artillery, attached to the garrison of Annecy (Haute Savoie), but at present on six weeks’ manoeuvres on the Needle...

It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is “the biggest” of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the...

The present chronicler now appeals to August Sedlaček, Joseph Pekař, and other authorities on the writing of history, in support of the statement that a vast amount of historical knowledge can be draw...

“Well, I’ll go to blazes,” said Captain Trouble, “if that lanky fellow over there isn’t their leader!” “That’s Jimmy,” remarked G. H. Bondy. “He used to work here at one time. I thought he was quite t...

And while the world shook with the clash of armies, while the boundaries of States writhed to and fro like earthworms, and the whole earth was crumbling into a field of ruins, old Mrs. Blahous was pee...

In the autumn of 1953 the Greatest War was drawing to a close. There were no armies left. The armies of occupation, cut off for the most part from their homes, were dwindling away and gradually vanish...

Many years went by. Brych the stoker, now the proprietor of a locksmith’s business, was sitting in the Damohorsky tavern, reading a copy of the People’s Journal. “The liver sausages will be ready in a...

This name which Marek gave to his atomic boiler is, of course, quite incorrect, and is one of the melancholy results of the ignorance of Latin among technicians. A more exact term would have been Komb...