Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews by John Grant Page A

behind – because of a sudden unexplained ear infection – when, a few years before, the starship Earth Star-1 set off on its maiden voyage. Powered by a brand-new and little understood hyperdrive, Earth Star-1 vanished in a burst of light just after entering hyperspace. No one at home can now remember the details of the hyperdrive's workings, and all the plans for its construction have disappeared. Occasionally people wonder if Allen – the inventor of the hyperdrive, who vanished with Earth Star-1 and whose credentials no one at SICOM (read NASA) thought to check when they employed him because he was such a genius an' all – might have had something to do with the mystery.
    Well, of course he did. He was a member of an alien species, the Theonians, who're so astonishingly humanoid that they can even breed with us. The Theonians have long been in a state of cultural and psychological moribundity. For ages they've been purloining humans – including many of the crew of the Eldridge , the ship that had all that trouble as the subject of the Philadelphia Experiment – and carting them off to the planet Theon for intermarriage and interbreeding: the Theonians may have incredible mental powers, teletransporting themselves here and there at will, but Earthmen, you see, bonk better. "The women are certainly happier these days than before the arrival of our first visitors," pronounces alien leader Heron.
    Joshua, investigating mysterious disappearances, is drawn to the coastal New Jersey small town of Sarah's Landing, from where a disproportionate number of people have gone missing. In fact, as the locals say, the vanishings all seem to happen from one particular building, in which Joshua promptly rents himself an office – but not before he and rangy redhead telepath Alexandra have become lovers.
    When Alexandra hops off to New York for a few days, Joshua discovers where all those missing persons have gone: to Theon. In Theon he discovers he can do things like fly before being dragooned into Theonian society and told to forget Alexandra, whom he already knows is his true love: after all, Heron's daughter, Adrianne, is now of age to become his new lover. Since she's if anything even more heart-wrenchingly sensational than Alexandra, Joshua dutifully acquiesces ... although able to maintain sporadic telepathic contact with Alexandra, even managing on one occasion to teleport himself home for a quick night of passion.
    The net result is that both women become pregnant by him roughly simultaneously. Moreover, their fetuses are capable of telepathic communication as well ...
    Oh, did I forget to mention that all this while Earth has been in radio-type contact with another alien species, the Crlllions, of planet Crlllion? That's because the author does as well, until page 243, where the fact is introduced almost as an aside. Indeed, although we aren't told this until even later in the book, it was to Crlllion that Earth Star-1 was sent, at the suggestion of the Crlllions. Obviously (by now) the starship vanished from human ken because the Theonians nabbed it – indeed, they were responsible for it in the first place, because Allen's commission was to deliver home a nice big consignment of Earthlings all in one fell swoop. But that wasn't the only reason the Theonians seized the vessel: late, late in the book they tell Joshua that they were saving humanity from itself, because all the Crlllions really want to do with the other species they contact is lure them to Crlllion and eat them, to make up for the food shortages there.
    (As an aside, think of the name "Crlllion". Since it must be a phonetic rendition of the name the aliens call themselves – unless, miraculously, they use the Roman alphabet – where the hell did that triple-"l" come from? Wouldn't the name, in English, be spelled "Krillian", or something like that? Perhaps the author thinks giving the aliens a real weirdo unpronounceable name will make them seem somehow