Out there in the green star system; far beyond the confining grip of the Federation, moved the feared Bitter Star, for a thousand frigid years the dark and sinister manipulator of war-weary planets.
Being trapped in the steaming h-l of Venus is no excuse for forgetting one's manners-but anyone abducted, marooned, tricked, kept from tea might well crack under the strain!
To translate writings, you need a key to the code-and if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years before the first writer of Earth was born .
Two men had died before Syme Rector's guns to give him the key to the ancient city of Kal-Jmar-a city of untold wealth, and of robots that made desires instant commands.
Inconspicuous in his half of the room, which was dark, Henry Walters watched his partner fraying down into tatters like a mooring line caught between hull and dock.
More feared than the deadly green snakes, the hideous red beetles of that outpost of Earth Empire, was the winged dragon-queen of Jupiter and her white Legions of Doom.
Trapped in a protective underground world made of reinforced concrete they can here their enemies chipping away at their walls day after day, year after year, eventually they will get through, then what happens?
Besides being born (that is an ordeal, no less an ordeal because you forget it) the worst thing to be gone through is to be a new boy in a small Southern town.
