Another Earth

Lieutenant Colonel Philip Snow, flight surgeon and test director for an ambitious space program, is haunted by a capsule test that seems to reveal more than a mechanical failure. The project's astronauts are monitored with obsessive care for every physical and psychological reaction, including the dreaded "breakoff," a state of isolation and detachment that could doom a mission as surely as any engineering flaw. Yet the greatest danger may lie in the human mind itself. Hamilton Richardson, the program's brilliant and apparently flawless astronaut, becomes the focus of a simulated pressure-loss experiment. In the midst of the test, Snow hears him fall silent and then speak in a strange, chant-like stream of sounds before returning to normal. The recording confirms the sounds are real, and when Richardson later falls into an unresponsive sleep, speaking the same uncanny language, Snow turns to Abe Franstein, the team's gifted psychologist and linguist. As the mystery deepens, Franstein and Snow explore possibilities ranging from hidden mental states to spiritualism, reincarnation, and even communication from another time. Richardson's own dream of a vast ship carrying seeds, eggs, and animal sperm toward another Earth suggests a desperate exodus from catastrophe. Under hypnosis, the strange sounds emerge again, hinting that Richardson's mind may be guarding a secret far larger than anyone expected. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.