The six-time Hugo Award–winning author of Voyagers continues his first contact trilogy with a novel of an alien takeover of the mind.

Keith Stoner has been in a state of suspended animation for eighteen years, ever since he was an American member of a joint US-Soviet venture to capture an alien ship. But when the Soviets had to pull out, Stoner willfully persisted and it was then, during that time on the ship, that Stoner fell into the strange state that was neither here, nor there.

Jo Camerata, the ambitious young student who fell in love with Stoner, is now head of Vanguard Industries, which has recovered the alien ship. As a result, her company now controls the vast new technology and the fortune it reaps—as well as Keith Stoner. What Camerata doesn't know, however, is that someone else has been awake, someone who dwells deep within the labyrinths of Stoner's mind.

"The alien within Stoner serves Bova as a splendid device . . . The very best, however, is the plausibility of detail that makes his work a sort of poetry of the near future." —Chicago Tribune