Search Worlds Without End

BORDER POST OF ETERNITY

Robotic minds made interstellar travel possible, but human minds still controlled the destination and purpose of such flight. Conflict develops only when a programmed brain cannot evaluate beyond what is visible and substantial, whereas the human mind is capable of infinite imagination - including that which is unreal.

Such was the problem at the singularity in space in which the ALTAIR STAR and a hundred other vessels had come to grief. At that spot, natiral laws seem subverted - and some other universe's rules impinged.

For Buchanan, the station meant a chance to observe and maybe rescue his lost vessel. For the robotic navigators of oncoming spaceships, the meaning was different. And at Singularity Station the only inevitable was conflict.

Beneath the Earth's shattered crust... does the Black Army still wait?

After a thousand years of defeat... is the Black Army still fit?

Inside their lost underground stronghold... is the Black Army drilling?

Archeologists considered the legend superstition and poked about among the surface ruins. Tourists regarded the tales as tourism ads to glamorize a burned-out world. Robots believed only what they saw and none had ever seen such an army. But when a combination of all three tripped the alarm by accident, they found reality turned suddenly into nightmare... as the Black Army awoke to march against the universe!

A sea of destruction in space
Littered with the debris of spacecraft... and the dead
A failed exodus
Those who remain face almost certain annihilation.
Yet one final decision must be made
A choice between life and death
In which humanity is a liability
Ethics are expendable
War may be the only recourse
And survival must be won... at any cost.

Blasting through the cosmos on a collision course with adventure, the 311 inhabitants of Alpha travel to mysterious, uncharted regions of the galaxy. Each day is a game of survival with the merciless universe.

On Alpha, Commander Koenig is still breathing. His soul has been stolen by a dazzling woman in a purple city that exists in the realm of thought only. And blood runs cold when an alien force transforms a crewman into an icy, energy-consuming monster -- who won't stop until Alpha freezes over.

He had forgotten his real name, so they called him "Spingarn" after the last role he had played. He was the man the directors of the Frames regarded as their major headache - for he was guilty of two unforgivable arrogances. He had programmed himself into every one of the vast world-staged dramas he had directed - and he had reactivated the forbidden Frames of the pre-human planet of Talisker.

In those days of an overcrowded colonized cosmos, a thousand years from now, the Frames were the major means of diversion. Historical re-creations and fictional dramas played out with planets as stages and whole populations as actors - the Frame directors and their robot assistants had become the masters of all life.

They could not destroy Spingarn, THE PROBABILITY MAN, but they could sentence him to undo the damage he had done. So he was sent to the mad Frames of Talisker to unravel the secret of their origin a billion years before the universe.

The Frames were only a realization of the ultimate form of escape. Books, films, sensors, complete total experience - and finally the Frames. The saviors of civilization had shown the way: move the tribes of Americans to Europe, the tribes of the Germans to Spain, the tribes of the English to Switzerland and permutate the combinations endlessly. Use trains, then aircraft, then spaceships.

The Frames of the Thirtieth Century were a logical extension of the Mechanical Age's exploitation of the means of mass travel. Now, whole populations moved to new areas of experience. New worlds - new re-created worlds - were manufactured for them. And it had all begun on Talisker. But whatever had left the monstrous scenery on Talisker's desert had not begun anywhere in our universe.