
Transcriber's Note:
by LESTER DEL REY
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VIII
Wilbur Hawkes jolts awake in a cold sweat, the remnants of a nightmarish vision still clawing at his mind. The room around him feels abandoned—dusty, dimly lit, a tape recorder humming uselessly—while he discovers a cigarette in his hand, a habit he never had. As fragments of his recent past slip away—married life, a stormy confrontation, a mysterious letter—an unsettling urgency drives him to scramble for clothes he doesn’t recognize, clutching a slip of paper marked with cryptic Greek symbols and an unfinished equation.
The frantic pace of Hawkes’ escape hints at forces pressing ever closer, but the source of the threat remains hidden, leaving only the echo of a voice urging him onward. With a mix of dread and curiosity, listeners are drawn into a world where memory fractures, reality blurs, and a scientist’s desperate flight may uncover secrets far beyond ordinary survival.
Language
en
Duration
~1 hours (101K 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
2010-03-10
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1915–1993
A lively early voice in American science fiction, he helped shape the genre both as a writer of fast-moving stories and as an influential editor. His work ranged from robot tales and juvenile adventures to the books that helped define Del Rey’s publishing legacy.
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by Lester Del Rey

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by Lester Del Rey

by Lester Del Rey

by Lester Del Rey