Raymond F. Jones – författare

CALL ME KETAN! Like all my companions in Kronweld I emerged full-grown from the Temple of Birth. My needs, my wishes, my passions were coldly filed in the perforated transparencies that constitute the integrated will of Kronweld. But I alone harbour curiosity about our past. I alone know the Bors of Dark Land and how they are born. I alone have discovered the hidden secret of our birth... and have heard the groaning fertility prisoners of the other world. Here is their message: "If any of you live, come through to us. Save us. Bring weapons!" I am going to them now. I do not know whether I will ever return from the great Edge...

There lived on Mars, 500,000 years ago, a race so intelligent, so superior to ours, that they knew the secret of everlasting life. They chose instead-to have one man come back to life exactly 500,000 years after his death! His reappearance in the Galaxy World was enough to set planet against planet, ideology against ideology, man against man, and life against death.

When human genes go wild, reproduction can no longer be left to chance - and it is Robert Wellton, Chief of the Genetics Bureau, the most feared and hated man in the world, who decides who will mate with whom.But nobody can tell Wellton whom to mate with! He alone knows that the Genetics Program is collapsing, for fewer Normals are found each yer - and his father, who had been Genetics Chief before him, had discovered that not all Deviates are nature''s failures. Some are telepathic and long-lived - like Robert Wellton himself.Thus is born the plan that Adam Wellton conceived and that Robert Wellton carries on - the creation of a Secret People. Born of Normal mothers, they are all Wellton''s sons and daughters, bearing his improved genes - living hidden in a colony in the Canadian wilderness, protected from the hate and jealousy of civilization by Wellton, who stays in telepathic touch with them. But disaster strikes when a bitter powerful committee, suspecting the existence of concealed Deviates, begins a relentless search for them. Wellton knows there can be only one result - he Secret People will be hunted down and wiped out!

It was supercivilization, a Utopia. At its core were the Cybernetic Brains, brains taken from geniuses who were promised they would live forever.Then engineer Al Demming discovers the truth accidentally, the terrible truth transmitted to him by one of the brains. The brains are in reality slaves and in terrible torment. It was now up to Demming to stop the inhuman practice.Just when he planned to make the announcement to the Governing Board, Demming learned that the Board knew about the hideous living death. What was the real reason behind the facade? How could he convince the Board to suspend the system before the Brains revolted and destroyed the world?

One was discovered quite by accident. A man in a mental hospital said he wasn''t real. He wasn''t.There were more. Scientists feared that half the population of Earth might be Syns.Methodically, the Syns were being rooted out and destroyed. In turn, they were carrying on their own fearful destruction of human life and works.Everyone''s humanity had been challenged. Every man was aligned against each other...because no one knew what a Syn was.

A century earlier, the Markovians were the meanest, nastiest, orneriest specimens in the entire Council of Galactic Associates. The worlds in their corner of their galaxy controlled a military force that outweighed anything the Council could possibly bring to bear against them.With complete disregard for interplanetary order they harassed and attacked peaceful shipping and inoffensive cultures throughout a wide territory. For years the Council debated and threatened - but nothing was ever done. Then, so gradually it was hardly noticed, the harassments began to die down. The warlike posturing was abandoned by the Markovians. Within a period of about seventy or eighty years there was a complete about-face.What had happened? Cameron and his new wife Joyce are going into unfriendly regions to find out...