Conquest Over Time

Pat Travis, a legendary Contact Man, races a battered ship toward Diomed III—also known as Mert—in a brutal corporate scramble to win first-contact rights before rival companies do. He expects a routine landing on an "Open Planet," but instead finds a world that looks like a Dickens novel in space and lives by a far stranger law: astrology governs government, marriage, work, justice, and even childbirth. When an eclipse marks his arrival as catastrophically unlucky, Travis is knocked unconscious and wakes in a sewer hideout among outcasts who have built a harsh society beneath the respectable world above. There he meets Navel, her brother Lappy, and the hulking Tude, and begins to unravel Mert's bizarre beliefs by using them against themselves. As satire sharpens into adventure, Travis discovers that Lappy is a genuine scientific talent, and that the planet's "fate" may be based on a fatal gap in its knowledge. By recognizing that Diomed III has overlooked a missing planet, he turns astronomy into leverage, outwits the locals, and secures a lucrative contract. But even as he wins the race, Travis realizes that on Mert, science, survival, and personal attraction may all prove more dangerous than first contact itself. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.