Notes
Pebble in the Sky, a Galactic Empire novel by Isaac Asimov.

Grow Old with Me, an earlier, shorter version of this novel written in 1947 was rejected by Startling Stories and Astounding, but was eventually published in The Alternate Asimovs in 1986.

The image opposite and the blurb below are from the 1978 printing of the Sphere Books paperback edition, ISBN 0722112645. Cover illustration by Peter Elson.

Publisher’s Blurb – Lower Cover
NOW YOU SEE HIM – NOW YOU DON’T . . .

On a bright summer day in 1949, Joseph Schwartz walked past the Institute for Nuclear Research in Chicago, quoting Browning to himself.

And then something went very wrong with time and space, and Joseph Schwartz quite literally walked into the future – to be precise, into Galactic Era 827.

He was still on Earth, but it was an Earth left barren by atomic war, peopled only by a few outcasts left behind when mankind built a new dynasty among the stars. Now a revolution was brewing on Earth that would bring disaster on the Galactic Empire. And it seemed that the one man who could avert the disaster was Joseph Schwartz. . . .

Here is a boldly imaginative novel of the far future by the Grand Master of science fiction, Isaac Asimov.

Alternative Version
Grow Old Along with Me, an earlier, shorter version of Pebble in the Sky was published in The Alternate Asimovs (Doubleday, 1986)
Cover below from the 1987 Grafton Paperback Edition, ISBN 0586071628. Cover illustration by Chris Foss.