Anything You Can Do!
A killing machine falls from the stars. The Nipe arrives on Earth possessing strength, speed, and senses that make humans seem like insects beneath its feet, and it sees us as nothing more than prey. When a forester named Wang Kulichenko witnesses the alien's crash landing, he stumbles into humanity's first contact scenario: a nightmare of claws and hunger that leaves a trail of mutilated bodies across the wilderness. The government responds with desperate speed, funding a secret program to create a human capable of matching the Nipe's horrific abilities. The result is a modified operative who can think faster, move faster, kill faster. But as the hunt intensifies, a darker question emerges: when you remake humanity to fight a monster, what becomes of the thing you were trying to save? Randall Garrett's 1960s classic probes the Cold War anxiety of escalation, if we can become anything, do we lose ourselves in the process? For readers who crave hard SF that thinks big and hits hard.
