But his insurance covered freezing in liquid nitrogen against the possibility of someday being thawed, repaired, and returned to life. Which is how he woke up in 2527, with a quarter of a million dollars coming to him from the same insurance policy. Not that he was rich—he was quickly informed that two million was a bare subsistence income. He needed a job, and quick. While looking, he somehow unintentionally insulted a man who took out a license to injure or kill him, attracted the attention of a woman who wanted to begin a relationship, said relationship being very unlike anything Forrester had heard of in his time—and he found a job. However, his employer was an alien, one of a group being held captive on Earth to keep them from getting home and giving the location of Earth to a civilization which might be hostile. And that was when things really became interesting.

    Ordered to destroy the comet, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal...2034: Then a reply is heard. Searching for the source of this signal that comes from outside the solar system, Nigel discovers the existence of a sentient ship. When the new vessel begins to communicate directly with him, the astronaut learns of the horrors that await humanity. For the ship was created by an alien race that has spent billions and billions of years searching for intelligent life...to annihilate it.In the Ocean of Night is a 1977 hard science fiction novel by Gregory Benford. It is the first novel in his Galactic Center Saga. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1977. It was first published as a novelette in the May/June 1972 edition of Worlds of If Science Fiction.

    Librarian Note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here Dom Salabos had a lot of advantages.As heir to a huge fortune he had an excellent robot servant (with Man-Friday subcircuitry), a planet (the First Syrian Bank) as a godfather, a security chief who even ran checks on himself, and on Dom's home world even death was not always fatal.Why then, in an age when prediction was a science, was his future in doubt?