"The Custodians "tells of a visitor to a French monastery, and of one specially built tiny room which is constructed precisely on the intersection of mysterious force fields, so that anyone who enters is able to foresee the future. "Paradise Beach" is the story of a wall-screen whose image of the sea attunes itself to the individual perceptions of the onlooker. "Piper at the Gates of Dawn "is set towards the end of the next millennium when the stories about the coming of the mysterious white bird of kinship become associated with the travels of an old story-teller and his young nephew, whose pipe seems to have a magical quality. Finally, "The Hertford Manuscript" tells of the remarkable discovery of a seventeenth-century book with some pages purporting to be the journals of a nineteenth-century time traveller.