John E. Muller – författare

Earth was a crowded world of vast cities, manned by robots who carried out all of the menial tasks, who saw to it that everything contained functioning normally. Interplanetary travel was now an established fact. The planets favourable to Man''s existence had been colonised but where, as yet, under-developed according to Earth standards.In the whole of the Solar System, mankind was supreme. There was life on Mars, Venus and the outer moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but nothing which could match the military might of Earth.Yet now, Earth itself faced destruction. Quite suddenly the thread had materialised. There was no doubt in anyone''s mind that Someone - or Something - wanted Earth. But vast creatures such as these had never originated on any of the Solar Planets and Brad Norton, investigating events for the Military Commission, refused to believe that they could have been transported through space from an of the stars.But the undeniable fact was that they were here and Earth science was powerless against them...

They came out of the great abyss which lay around the Earth, from the planet of a star so distant that it could not be seen with the naked eye. Their purpose was survival and the conquest of Earth. They were alien and possessed a mysterious force which lay at the very origin of human comprehension; the ability to enter into a man''s mind, to make him think the thoughts they chose, to make him hear and see and feel the things they wanted.Against such a force there seemed no defence; for who could say that the man or woman by his side was not motivated by one of these creatures? Who could say that his own thoughts and senses belonged to him and not to some ''thing'' seated in some alien way inside his brain?