When the Universal Transmitting Company finally perfected a matter transmitter capable of sending a person instantly from terminals scattered throughout the United States to any major city in foreign countries, it seemed like man's ultimate conquest of time. Opening day in New York City was a tremendous success, with throngs of travelers crowding into the terminal. But on the second day of operations, two women failed to arrive at their destinations and could not be traced. The UTC called in private detective Jan Darzek. What Darzek discovers sends him on a trail of extraterrestrial adventure and gripping suspense...on which hinges the fate of all mankind!

Sinister, invisible forces of a secret mental weapon known only as The Dark are threatening the entire Primores galaxy, several transmitting leaps away from Earth. By the time a bizarre Mr. Smith comes to detective Jan Darzek's New York office, whole planets have been lain waste.Darzak is offered a million dollars by Smith to accept a job that will almost certainly be fatal: identify the incredible power that is about to overwhelm the few remaining planets in the beleagered galaxy, so that these worlds might somehow halt the rampage. A superb science fiction novel by a master of the genre.

Sweeping through the Small Magellanic Cloud, leaving a trail of ravished worlds and destroyed civilization, is the Udef—the Unidentified Death Force. The best scientific minds of two galaxies can make nothing of it. The Udef is invisible. No scientific instrument can detect its presence. The only marks of its passing are the screams of its victims and the piles of dead left in its wake. Momentarily safe on the world of Montura, Jan Darzek's strategy against the Udeffalters. He and his assistant Effie have been ordered there by a supreme computer—that isn't telling why. There is nothing to do on Montura but frantically wheel and deal in its spectacular interworld trading market. Supreme has also sent a perplexed Dr. Malina Darr from Earth, whose apparent purpose is to cure an unknown disease in an alien life form no one has ever seen ... The three of them must content with a mad mixture of Montura's mysterious race of natives, the melange of self-serving life forms in the marketplace, and the Kloatraz—the universe's strangest "living" computer—while the Udef comes ever closer to wiping out every intelligent life form in the universe. Somehow it must be stopped before no one is left to fight it.

Twenty agents of the Galactic Sythesis are missing on the Silent Planet of Kamm—the victims, it seems, of the most powerful death ray the universe has ever known. But how could the primitive technology of the Kammians have produced such a weapon? And why would they unleashed its power against the Sythesis? It's Jan Darzek's mission to find out...

Jan Darzek, former private detective from Earth and now First Councilor of the Galaxy, has encountered his most baffling case. The planet Nifron D has been inexplicably turned into a sun. A quarter of a galaxy away, a native on the planet Skarnaf has been found horribly disfigured by an impossibly massive dose of radiation. While Darzek searches for a connection between the two events, the populous and prosperous world of Vezpro receives a blackmail letter that threatens it with the fate of Nifron D. In a crimeless society, has a master scientist turned master criminal? Darzek must decide quickly whether the letter is a monstrous hoax. If it is not, how can the impossible demands be met—or five billion inhabitants evacuated in time?