With complete disregard 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, in this classic adventure from one of the early novelists of science fiction, Raymond F. Jones.

Author Biography

Raymond Fisher Jones (1915 - 1994) was an American science fiction author. He is best known for his 1952 novel This Island Earth, which was adapted into the eponymous 1955 film. Most of Jones' short fiction was published during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, in magazines such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories and Galaxy. His sixteen novels were published between 1951 and 1978. His short story "Rat Race," first published in the April 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, was nominated for a Hugo Award. In 1996, "Correspondence Course," first published in the April 1945 edition of Astounding Stories, was nominated for a Retro Hugo award for best short story. Another short story, "The Alien Machine," first published in the June 1949 edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories, was later combined with two other short stories, "The Shroud of Secrecy" and "The Greater Conflict" and expanded into the novel This Island Earth, upon which the movie of the same name was based. Jones also wrote the story upon which a 1952 Tales of Tomorrow television program episode, titled "The Children's Room," was based. Jones short story, "Tools of the Trade," that appeared in the November 1950 issue of Astounding, was the first story dealing with 3D printing, although he called it "Molecular Spray" at the time.