Neal ("Storm") Cloud, nucleonic genius, set out in his spaceship *Vortex Blaster* to track and destroy the vortices. What he finds extends far beyond any threat of nature.
Lane Fleming was a prominent collector of antique firearms. One night when he was working in his gunroom on a new acquisition, a shot rang out and he was found dead on the floor. The coroner somewhat hastily ruled that the death was an accident; more sober heads assumed it was suicide, but that the truth was hushed up for fear of scuppering a major takeover deal involving Fleming's company.
Technological upheavals caused by inventions of our own are bad enough, but this was the ultimate depression, caused by the ultimate alien invention--which no Earthman ever saw!
He was tired of people--a "human interest" columnist, who specializes in glamorizations of the commonplace and sordid is likely to get that way. So. this starship seemed to offer the ideal escape from it all
A Playboy is someone with power, too much time on his hands, and too little sense of a goal worth achieving. And if the Playboy happens to belong to a highly advanced culture....
Tremendous and glittering, the Space Station floated up out of the Big Dark. Lieutenant Corriston had come to see its marvels, but he soon found himself entrapped in its unsuspected terrors. For the grim reality was that some deadly outer-space power had usurped control of the great artificial moon. A lovely woman had disappeared; passengers were being fleeced and enslaved; and, using fantastic disguises, imposters were using the Station for their own mysterious ends...