Quofum

The mission to planet Quofum to investigate unknown flora and fauna is supposed to be a quickie for Captain Boylan and his crew. The first surprise is that Quofum, which seems to regularly slip in and out of existence, is actually therewhen they arrive. The second surprise is Quofum’s wild biodiversity: The planet is not logical, ordered, or rational. But the real shock comes when the crew members not only find a killer in their midst but discover that their spaceship is missing–along with all means of communication. Of course, the marooned teammates know nothing about the Great Evil racing toward the galaxy, or about Flinx, the only person with half a chance to stop it. Nor do they know that Quofum could play a crucial role in defeating the all-devouring monster from beyond.

“Intriguing.”— *Publishers Weekly

• “[An] astonishing riot of life-forms . . . The book is tantamount to a stand-alone, though certainly significant in the greater epic.”— Booklist
  

Alan Dean Foster has written in a variety of genres, including hard science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Approaching Storm and the popular Pip & Flinx novels, as well as novelizations of several films, including Transformers, Star Wars, the first three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction, the first science fiction work ever to do so. Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, live in Prescott, Arizona, in a house built of brick that was salvaged from an early-twentieth-century miners’ brothel. He is currently at work on several new novels and media projects.

Chapter One

Like everyone else on the Dampier, Tellenberg was a volunteer and a polymath. With a full crew of only half a dozen there was no room on the low-budget expedition for specialists. At least among the scienti?c complement, everyone had been chosen for their ability to do work in several disciplines. Tellenberg hoped he would have the opportunity to exercise all of his considerable range of knowledge. Like the others, his greatest fear had been that they would emerge from space-plus to ?nd that the world they were charged with surveying and exploring was nothing more than a myth.

If it accomplished nothing else, the mission had already put that particular worry to rest.

Quofum was there, a thickly cloud-swathed world situated between the orbits of the system’s second and third planets, exactly where the much earlier robot probe had predicted. As the Dampier decelerated toward its destination, he hurried forward to catch a ?rst glimpse of the new world through the sweeping port that dominated the bridge. Screens in his cabin and the lab could have provided much more detailed representations. But experiencing a new world in the form of a projection as opposed to viewing it in vivo was not the same thing. In this manner Tellenberg had previously been privileged to experience First contact with two newly discovered planets. Quofum would be his third and, if the preliminary survey turned out to be valid, the most unusual...