In seventeenth-century Delft, a fanatically curious fabric merchant invents the microscope. Even as he neglects and abuses his family, he discovers a new world of life.

While recovering from a serious illness, a ninety-year-old scientist wades through his patchy memory, piecing together fragments of images and emotions from his childhood as an immigrant in the once-moving American 1940s. He thinks about his admiration for airplanes, which have been outlawed in this alternate history. He considers how such scientific advancements can also bring about great destruction.

A young man working in an intense laboratory falls madly in love with a machine that can invent new sensations on this skin - until the experiment is destroyed.

On a train ride to a metallurgical conference in Chicago, a consultant tries to avoid the debate between pure and applied sciences, but he cannot avoid it when he gets cornered in the washroom by two professors and an undecided bright new recruit.

A scientist reminisces about an old affair while he watches his time-machine lab burn down.

Through three tales of impossible machines with abilities to manipulate the physical world, travel through time and space, and bestow telepathy onto an entire community, candidates of an engineering exam in the far future are asked to ponder fantastical implications of technology.

An ordinary man gets an inch and a half of mention in the newspaper after stumbling into a low stakes rescue — and the small bit of fame sends him spiraling down a dark, egotistical path.

Days after announcing an invention that will change the fabric of his futuristic world, an inventor goes missing and two detectives must find out where he is and what his supposedly groundbreaking invention was.

Stuck with a broken engine in the middle of icy cold weather, a traveler goes to a nearby farm to seek help. He comes across a boy with a greater problem than his own, and changes his plans to help out the boy and his sick grandfather.

A science fiction fan travels back in time to the 1930s in order to locate Isaac Asimov's famously lost first manuscript.