Summary: A collection of three novellas: “Some lapse of time,” in which an inarticulate time-traveller from a post-nuclear-holocaust future fails to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the “present day” (the story was published in 1963); “Imprint of chaos,” the original basis for Brunner's striking “Traveller in Black” fantasy series, in which the intervention of a god leads a society to abandon its foolish, superstitious reliance on the intervention of gods; and “Thou good and faithful,” a negligible story about a society of robots in retirement on a garden planet, seemingly deserted by the intelligent species who made the robots.