It meant little to young Robert Fairlie, a serious and dedicated
philologist, that in this year 1966 the United States and Soviet Russia
were contentious about the Moon. He had little interest in the first two
rocket landings on the moon, and the bases that the two nations had
built there. He knew nothing at all of the shattering discovery that the
Americans had made there.
For what had been found was of such explosive potentialities that it had
to be kept top-secret--the discovery that space had already been
conquered long ago by races who had once spanned the stars. So that men
who had expected to spend decades in reaching the nearest planet, found
suddenly in their hands the way to the wider universe.
Fairlie, drawn unexpectedly because of his special knowledge into this
greatest of secrets, finds that a guarded New Mexico rocket-base is only
the first step of the way. That way leads out amid the unexplored stars
to the lost heartworld of those space-conquerors of long ago. And it
leads Fairlie and others into the appalling reality of stellar space
still haunted by the past cosmic struggle whose scale in space and time
dwarfs the rivalries of tiny Earth's quarreling nations.
