
In a half‑ruined assembly hall lit by firelight and the flicker of magnesium, a lone operative named Karnes slips through a broken window, his breath shallow and his rifle steadied. He’s hunting a shape‑shifting thief who vanished with a cache of microfilm that could rewrite history. The tense chase threads through smoke‑filled corridors, gunshots echoing against steel and brick.
As the pursuit reaches a stark office, a mysterious oblate sphere dominates the room, its surface shimmering with an iridescent hue. When the fleeing figure steps through the seemingly solid globe, both man and object dissolve into nothing, leaving Karnes alone with a lingering question about the nature of reality itself. The opening sets a high‑stakes contest between espionage and an uncanny, perhaps cosmic, deception, promising a story that blurs the line between fact and illusion, and invites listeners to wonder what lies beyond the visible.
Language
en
Duration
~49 minutes (47K 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
2010-04-22
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
Subjects

1927–1987
A prolific mid-century science fiction and fantasy writer, he became especially well known for the Lord Darcy stories, where detective fiction meets an alternate world shaped by magic. He also wrote heavily for the pulp magazines of the 1950s and 1960s and collaborated with other major SF writers.
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