In the near future, humanity decodes an alien signal using Inverse Multifractal Spectroscopy. They are blueprints for a mysterious machine. Led by astrobiologist Layla Norwood, the scientists assemble the device, which allows them to connect to a galactic network called the Network of Silence, where advanced civilizations exchange knowledge in ethical, non-material ways.
Jeffrey Meyer had a killing on his mind. It meant nothing to him that his towering Twenty-first Century world was going mad. He shouldered aside the rising tide of narcotics-mania, the gambling fever, the insatiable lust for the irrational. Jeff had his own all-consuming obsession--Paul Conroe must die!After a five-year frenzied chase, Jeff had his victim cornered; he'd driven him into the last hideaway of the world's most desperate men--the sealed vaults of the human-vivisectionists...
Somewhere, somehow, the first moves have been made--the pattern is beginning to emerge. Someone--or something--is on the way to supreme power over all the planets held by Man. And the Inter-stellar Corps is helpless to meet the threat--no normal man can hope to penetrate the conspiracy. But--the Corps has a man who isn't normal, a man with a very strange weapon... ..._his mind_.
To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of a crack-proof exile camp--get onto a ship that couldn't be boarded--smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he wasn't even Clayton any more. He was only