The first part would lead me to “Childhood’s End” by Clarke but the rest of the story doesn’t match up.
Short story, if I recall correctly; gist of story is a time traveler who misconstrued the direction in which probabilities diverge, was trying to travel forward in time and went backwards instead, time machine only goes in one direction so he can’t come back. He is “Merlin” circa King Arthur and the “wand” is a Colt 45 or some such. Something happens to make it necessary for him to escape Arthurian times and he ends up in distant past and creates Stonehenge for the express purpose of finding out when the hell he ended up.
Sometime between 1970 and 1990 I read a short story where people are being evacuated from a planet/moon. They are lining up to board the space ships. Some youngsters are busy playing with cars and trucks in the school yard. Their teacher is angry with them for playing. The kids are extremely intent and serious. The teacher kicks the trucks and pours water on them.
Later it turns out that the cars/trucks are foreshadowing what will happen to the escape pods. The last pod (which the teacher is on) is scheduled to be kicked out of orbit and/or flooded out.
Does this ring a bell at all? I probably remember the details only partially and could have some of them wrong.
Edited to add: Oh, and the teacher realizes it and is feeling guilty and sick at heart.
Ooh, ooh, I’ve got one! I read it in some type of “Best Short Stories of Some Year” collection. It more supernatural than sci-fi, though, so you might not know it.
It involved a man waiting in a bar for another man, pondering angrily how the second man had ruined his life through manipulating him, and how he (the first man) was not going to let the second man hoodwink him again. The second man arrives. This other man has some sort of Jedi mind trick powers and gradually twists the first man’s ideas through his conversation, convincing the other guy that he is completely at fault. It was really well done, basically only a conversation, although I’m not describing it well.
I don’t recall where I read this story, but the details that I remember are: human colonists land on an apparently uninhabited planet, with conveniently cleared sections that the colonists used to grow crops, some of which are exported off-planet. At some point, the alien inhabitants “grow” out of the cleared sections, but they are badly misshapen, as portions of them were absorbed by the crops in some way, so the missing portions need to be tracked down and removed by the animals (or humans!) that they ended up in.
Sounds like it might be Eve’s Rib by Bryn Chandler.
*** Ponder
It would be Screw-P, by the way. Old LISP thing.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/p-convention.html
“Do you want to screw?”
Okay. Okay. This one… there’s only one real answer to.
It’s an Isaac Asimov story, and it’s about a really. Really. Really horrible pun.
No, no. I mean really horrible. Short-short.
Name it.
There are a few choices:
“Shah Guido G” ends with Atlantis sinking beneath the WAVES.
“Loint of Paw” ends with “A niche in time saves Stein”
“Sure Thing” ends with “Sloan’s Teddy wins the race”
and there’s “Death of a Foy” that ends
“Give my five hearts to Maude, Dwayne; dismember me for Harold’s choir”
Which one is your groaner?
It’s a Zenna Henderson short story, probably from The Anything Box, because it’s not one of her “People” stories. I don’t remember the title offhand.
My favorite bad Asimov pun is “the star mangled spanner.”
There’s a few more than that, Andy. But you’ve got it in your shortlist. Which is it? 
Actually that one’s by Clarke: “Neutron Tide” is the title I’m pretty sure
I’d guess “Loint of Paw.”
That sounds right - she did a lot of stories about children
Here’s the list of stories in “Anything Box” http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?THNTHNGBXX0000, btw.
Thanks. I have this weird ability, demonstrated here, to remember odd details about stories (not necessarily accurately) without remembering any of the substance.
Hey, I read something like that! He went to stay with his aunt, and the only way you could tell if you were a brain in a robot was by a scar on your stomach…
Upon further research, that book was apparently called “My Trip to Alpha-1”, by Alfred Slote. Is that it?
About twenty years ago I bought a used paperback from a garage sale for a quarter. I remember very little about it. I know that it was a bunch of science fiction stories all of them involving the same character, a man that I think was a scientist. One of the stories involved some sort of virtual reality device that allowed him to fully experience the pleasures of harems! I could have sworn that the
title of the collection was “The Best Laid Plans” but I can’t find a collection of short stories with that title so maybe my recollection of the title is completely wrong. I think that the stories were from the late sixties, early seventies.
Help!
Heh, I have a few that I’ve been trying to find the titles of.
The first is a book. I read it in the early 90’s, but I’m pretty sure it was published a lot earlier than than that. The paperback version had a blue cover.
The people in the story all live in giant trees that float through “space.” At the very beginning, it has one of the characters visiting a doctor while the doctor is digging a bug out of a woman’s brain. He says it’s to late for the woman, but hopefully he got all the damn eggs or something. The people get water by tossing a pot attached to a rope into ponds of water that occasionally float by. Partway through the story, the tree is ripped in half, and the main characters end up floating on a raft. Two of the members tie themselves to the side, and end up having sex.
Later on they find a ship, and make their way to another tree where they are captured and sold as slaves. I don’t remember anything else from this point on.
Another one, which I think is a short story, has this guy who invents a telescope that lets him see through anything, including back and fowards in time. This eventually leads the main character to realize that everyone is being watched by someone, always.
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I remember right now.
You really think that’s worse than
“Give my big hearts to Maude, Dwayne. Dismember me for Harold’s choir. Tell all the Foys on Sortibackenstrete that I will soon be there --”
The Integral Trees by Larry Niven.
“I See You” by Damon Knight.
*** Ponder