"Now this here planet," he said cautiously, "is whacky in a lot of ways. First of all they call it Mert. Just plain Mert. And they live in houses strictly from Dickens, all carriages, no sewers, narrow streets, stuff like that." But that wasn't all. . . . Travis, in reaching Diomed III before any others, found himself waging a one-man fight against more than this; he was bucking the strangest way of life you have ever heard of! What was the startling secret of Diomed III that almost caused Travis to lose his life? And who was Lappy. . . ?

Author Biography

Michael Shaara (1928 - 1988) was an American author of science fiction, sports fiction and historical fiction. He was born to Italian immigrant parents (the family name was originally spelled Sciarra, which in Italian is pronounced in a similar way) in Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated in 1951 from Rutgers University, where he joined Theta Chi, and served as a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division prior to the Korean War. Before Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines during the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer. He later taught literature at Florida State University while continuing to write fiction. The stress of this and his cigarette smoking caused him, at the early age of 36, to have a heart attack, from which he recovered completely. His novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. Shaara died of a heart attack in 1988 aged fifty-nine.