Equation of Doom

A fugitive pilot arrives on an alien world, desperate to disappear. What he finds instead is a conspiracy that spans three thousand worlds. The planet is ruled by giant amphibians with ambitions of galactic conquest. The beautiful tri-D woman who tracks him down wants more than love - she wants to control everything. And in the shadows, beings who exist outside the flow of time pull strings that stretch back millions of years. At the heart of the mystery lies an impossible question: why did nearly three thousand worlds suddenly and simultaneously give birth to intelligent life? The answer - when it finally arrives - is both terrifying and inevitable. Vance builds his puzzle with the precision of hard SF while never losing the breakneck pace of a space opera. The result is a novel that asks what it means to be human in a universe that may not be as accidental as it appears.