since he has no brain damage. He goes on to make a comfortable living "inventing" technologies he remembers from his home universe. And now when it gets foggy, he stays put. In "Wait It Out", an astronaut marooned on Pluto exposes himself to the planet's extreme cold, intending to go into frozen sleep until rescue eventually comes, but finds his brain still functioning due to superconductivity. In "Not Long Before the End", magic is real but is an exhaustible resource. An extremely old wizard who would otherwise long since have died of old age maintains his middle-aged condition by magic. When confronted by a dull warrior who is possessed by a demon, the wizard works a spell to destroy the demon by exhausting all the nearby magic. He then easily dispatches the warrior with a non-magical weapon, and his girlfriend carries him out of the magic-exhausted zone before he can die of old age. For now, he's saved. But he reflects that someday all the magic everywhere will be gone, and then the stupid warriors will win all the fights. In "Unfinished Story #1", a wizard describes a temperature-control spell that works by having a dull-witted demon select the kinetic energy of air molecules entering and leaving the room. His listener compliments him on the cleverness of the spell. But the wizard says that his clerk invented the spell, and calls him into the room: "Oh, Maxwell..." "Unfinished Story #2" is a one-liner. And "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers" explains all of the creation myths as a breeding experiment by aliens. 1971 short story collections Short story collections by Larry Niven Ballantine Books books