Prologue Science Fiction
8 total works
To Paul Clayton, obscure shipping clerk, his forty-fifth birthday was not an occasion for celebration. It meant the achievement of status of Senior Citizen, and with it several dubious privileges - not least of which was voluntary euthanasia, facilitated by the government issue suicide pill. Those who changed their minds, once they had broken the capsule containing the lethal pill, faced the prospect of forced labor camps in the Australian desert of the penal colony on Mars, where convicts toiled to make more space fit for Earth's over-spilling populations.
Under the supervision of the corrupt and brutal Mars Corps, Clayton crosses paths again with others he once knew on distant Earth. They find themselves caught up on a maelstrom of terror and political intrigue.
They came in armies from under the sea - they possessed an intelligence and cunning beyond any human.
These incredible tales were dismissed as the ravings of madmen by marine expert Peter Hollows, and his lovely assistant Sally Brent.
But then they appeared... strange and monstrous creatures that Hallows and his expedition might never live to describe.
Dr. Henshaw had created what he thought was a time travel machine and he had sent guinea pigs through it. But now he needed a human guinea pig to test it with.
Christopher Wilkinson thought the whole idea was absurd, until a book that had been sent through the machine came back with a thumb print on it, the fingerprint of Vanessa, his long lost sweetheart!
So Wilkinson agreed to the experiment. He stood in the white circle facing the machine as it began to gleam and spin, pulling him down through the tortuous coils of time...
It began with a few small items in the newspapers - dead dogs and cats, a mutilated child, a series of unexplained fires. Then suddenly it exploded into a full sized catastrophe.
Huge mutants - half rat, half man - began to take over the world, stealing children for slaves and destroying their populations.
Only a few people escaped, among them Tim Barrett, his wife Jane, and a handful of survivors. Alone on the high seas in a small ship, they set off to find the island where Dr. Theodore Piper had been experimenting with a sonic death ray.
They knew Dr. Piper was their only hope for personal and world survival - if he was still alive... if the King Rats hadn't forced him to serve their evil purpose... and if he could find a way to stop the spreading horror of invasion.
