It was infinitely worse when everyone in the world insisted it couldn't have happened the way he knew it had.
In a world where ESP and telepathy were normal, it was difficult to keep secrets. But Steve's search for his missing sweetheart brought him to the threshold of one of the greatest secrets of all time. And it was obvious that somebody would stop at nothing to keep him from uncovering it.
What were the oddly sinister symbols along otherwise ordinary roads? What was behind the spreading plague called Mekstrom's Disease? Why were there "blank" spots where telepathy didn't work? Who was the elusive enemy with powers even beyond those ESP had bestowed on mankind?
And, most important of all . . . could Steve find that enemy before they made him vanish too?
And then it came to him that what he really wanted was to possess a body of Mekstrom Flesh, to be a physical superman. . . .
Author Biography
George Oliver Smith (A1911 - 1981) (also known by the pseudonym Wesley Long) was an American science fiction author. Smith was an active contributor to Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s. His collaboration with the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. was interrupted when Campbell's first wife, Dona, left him in 1949 and married Smith. Smith continued regularly publishing science fiction novels and stories until 1960. His output greatly diminished in the 1960s and 1970s when he had a job that required his undivided attention. He was given the First Fandom Hall of Fame award in 1980. He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Smith wrote mainly about outer space, with such works as Operation Interstellar (1950), Lost in Space (1959), and Troubled Star (1957). He is remembered chiefly for his Venus Equilateral series of short stories about a communications station in outer space. Most of the stories were collected in Venus Equilateral (1947), which was later expanded with the remaining three stories as The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976). His novel The Fourth "R" (1959) - re-published as The Brain Machine (1968) - was a digression from his focus on outer space and an examination of a child prodigy.
