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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: At last the secrets of Newgrange, an Irish megalithic monument that is older than the ancient Pyramids, discovered! Not by an archaeologist but by an untidy Maths teacher and two of his students. When Jonathan and Cathy left school on an April day to find their missing teacher Barnabus they did not know what lay in store for them within a distant Galaxy--adventure, excitement, a crash course in astrophysics, and a relentless and all-powerful enemy that could destroy them in moments. Tom Richards has written an utterly compelling sci-fi novel, an unputdownable read for all whose imaginations can soar.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: 1994
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2004

8 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.2 MB], eReader (PDB) [270 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [267 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [235 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [231 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [263 KB], hiebook (KML) [579 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [295 KB], iSilo (PDB) [220 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [284 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [310 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [357 KB]
Words: 83446
Reading time: 238-333 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

In the fifth millennium B.C., five thousand years before the birth of Christ, a proud a prosperous people rose to form a civilisation that would not be matched for another seven thousand years. Founded on a continent that no longer exists, located off the Western seaboard of what is now modern-day Europe, these people built a culture whose aspirations were devoted to the individuals within their society.

For them war did not exist. Hunger was only an ancient memory. Care of the sick and old were taken for granted. These people wanted nothing more than to live in peace with their fellow men and women and to reap from the world only that which they believed necessary. Their lives were good. They sought wisdom from the land and ocean around them. They studied many things, and they built their foundation of knowledge into a formidable intellect that they used to serve the people in the world around them.

For almost two thousand years, these people forged what they saw around them into tools that they would use to serve the greater good. Cities were built, sprawling metropolis's which sheltered them from the elements, and into which they carved their unique signature. They created art, manipulating stone and paint to note those most important aspects of their lives.

They learned to write, to communicate their thoughts and decisions on a form of paper that was so delicate that they must protect it between thin sheets of pure crystal. They built industries, fished the seas, learned to construct boats and other forms of land transport, and had begun the process of conquering the skies.

Of all their people and specialists--the farmers, factory workers, industrialists and administrators--it was the scientists and engineers who saw furthest beyond their horizons, and who tried to learn the secrets that were held in the jig-saw puzzle of space and time.

In this society, there lived a man named Psorsis. Through hard work, determination, and innate intellect, he had advanced to the position of head mathematician, and now, in his middle years, had been assigned to the study of the planets and stars, to learn of the intricacies of their motion and matter. To Psorsis, the study of these objects was a vocation. He desired to do nothing else. Day after day, he studied the works of the scholars who had come before him. As a youth, he poured over their intricate mathematical equations, learning the effects that each celestial body had upon the other. As he studied, he realised that his predecessors had only scratched the surface of such knowledge. And with his usual determination, Psorsis began to delve deeper into the mysteries of the Universe.

He was, by nature, inquisitive. As he worked through the old writings, he began to develop his own theories of motion and time. These he set into complex mathematical equations; equations which attempted to explain the various relationships between mass and movement, between energy and time. As he worked, his answers only seemed to pose more questions. But Psorsis plodded on, undisturbed. His calculations and analyses ran to many pages, and his teachers and colleagues could only shake their heads, convinced that one day he would find the meaning of life, itself.

In his fiftieth year, Psorsis grew tired of mere mathematics. At night, he would look out at the heavens, at the sparkling bodies that floated through a dark sea, and wonder at their beauty. Not content to observe them with the naked eye, Psorsis perfected a morass of older technology which he had inherited, and one day finished his series of glass lenses, encasing them in a square tube of carefully finished crystals. On that night, he stared at the planets and stars that he had been studying for some many years, and knew then that his enquiries into their nature had only begun. And for years afterwards, he spent many hours observing that which lay beyond them. It was Psorsis who noted the faint rings around the planet that burned so brightly on a winter's night. It was Psorsis who dared to look into the face of the sun, using a series of filters to protect his eyes from blindness. It was Psorsis who accurately mapped the face of the moon, who observed its craters and mountains, and who dared to think that one day men of his culture might set foot upon that empty, yet mystifying, globe.

And finally, it was Psorsis who one day noted the faint light in the Eastern sky, and who charted it nightly. It was he, through his series of glass lenses, that discovered the strange shape of it, like the hairs of a horse's tail at full gallop. And it was he, through his mathematical calculations, who predicted that one day this faint light would grow brighter that the Sun itself, until at last it would impact with the planet which was his birthplace.