"He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had labored to take man to the stars, and, in a moment of success, the stars - the aloof - indifferent stars - had come to him. This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold's brain: The human race was no longer alone." Chapter 1, pg. 6

"It was amazing that so many abuses, follies, and evils could be dispelled by those messages from the sky. With the arrival of the Overlords, nations knew that they need no longer fear each other, and they guessed-even before the experiment was made-that...