Highway of Eternity

Book excerpt: Two present-day investigators race across time to escape malevolent aliens from the future and their terrible “gift” of immortality in this novel by a Nebula Award–winning author. What is the price of eternal life? Secret agent Jay Corcoran is about to learn the answer when his investigation into an inexplicable disappearance carries him and journalist friend Tom Boone hundreds of years into the past. Corcoran and Boone’s powerful extrasensory abilities lead them to an advanced transportation system through time, and back to the bucolic eighteenth-century English countryside. There, they discover a family from the distant future hiding from the Immortals—an alien race that, many centuries on, is seducing human subjects with the promise of eternal life. But at the cost of the corporeal self, there is no place in the aliens’ future for anyone unwilling to exist as mind alone. Now that the Evans family’s sanctuary has been breached, escape is the only answer—for Boone and Corcoran as well—and the only way out is forward . . . far forward. But racing through space and time can be a hazardous occupation, especially with monstrous beasts, killer robots, and Immortal body-destroyers waiting at every juncture. The last novel from acclaimed science fiction Grand Master Clifford D. Simak, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and numerous other awards, Highway of Eternity combines breathtaking action with provocative ideas and unparalleled ingenuity, the hallmarks of Simak’s exceptional art. It is a fitting finale for the man who stands alongside Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke as one of the true giants of speculative fiction’s Golden Age.