
Transcriber's Note:
by Darrell T. Langart
I
II
III
IV. INTERLUDE
V
VI
VII. INTERLUDE
VIII
A battered alien vessel drifts toward a yellow‑white star, its pilot—a lone Nipe—struggling to keep the dying craft from disintegrating. The ship’s power plants are crippled, its instruments sputtering, and every burst of thrust brings it closer to a catastrophic fusion. With no chance to call home and only a distant planet’s civilization left as a possible refuge, the survivor must navigate a perilous descent while wrestling with the memory of the brother he sacrificed to buy a sliver of time.
Meanwhile, Earth awakens to an unprecedented dilemma: the arrival of an unmistakably alien presence that demands something humanity has never possessed—a superman. The planet’s leaders and scientists scramble to understand the stranger’s cryptic needs, aware that any misstep could jeopardize both worlds. As the damaged ship arcs toward the solar system, the stakes rise, and a fragile alliance begins to form between two vastly different species, each hoping the other can provide the answer to their desperate survival.
Language
en
Duration
~2 hours (154K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
Dec 23, 2009
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
Subjects

1927–1987
A prolific American science fiction and fantasy writer, Randall Garrett is best known for the clever Lord Darcy mysteries, where magic functions as a rigorous science in an alternate twentieth-century world. His energetic short fiction and collaborations helped make him a memorable voice of mid-century speculative literature.
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