This book is like an old-time train steaming westward. For the outdoor enthusiast it carries two backpacking stories, a whitewater rafting account, and a tale which begins with a trek through the Sonoran desert. My first and only Western rides along. The baggage car holds a robot butler, a paramilitary elementary school, four quantum spaceships, and a flawed solution to overpopulation, among other stories. The passengers are characters from the stories. Each is different. Some are of different times, others of different places, and still others of different realities. But the characters all seem comfortable riding along together in this single volume, and I trust that the reader will share their comfort. To sort things out Ernie Ackerman undertakes a solo backpack trip to Man Eaten Lake. Mrs. Wigmore basks in the joy of the children at recess, until she has to press the red button. Along the Mexican border Jacob Ramirez encounters unexpected barriers at the intersection of three cultures. Evan Layton rings in four New Years as he flies west and, each time change sets the clock back more than an hour. In the Old West a lawyer and a stage coach driver have to rely on his pardner. Lost in the woods, Nolan Anders learns to be a woodsman. The robot butler seems to think he is somebody. Bunky gets more than a taste of true wilderness on his first whitewater rafting trip. In a loving relationship, time can infuse its own relativity. Albert Benson sells used cars, but a past life still haunts him. The spaceships didn't look like spaceships at all. And three more stories.