A government technician arrives in the quiet town of Elsby chasing a hidden transmitter that is disrupting a top-secret hyperwave project, but the signal leads him into a far stranger puzzle than espionage alone. Jimmy Tremaine discovers that the interference seems to echo from multiple points at once, and his search soon points toward Mr. Bram, a long-lived outsider whose name has haunted local memory for decades. As Tremaine digs through town records, old newspapers, and wary testimony, ...

In a rain-slicked future city where law has been replaced by toll collectors, armed escorts, and criminal bosses, a desperate drifter takes a job driving armored hack number 16 into Manhattan. Smith knows the route is a gauntlet of checkpoints, ambushes, and hidden agendas, but he has little left to lose. His passenger, the cool and cryptic Stenn, may be just as dangerous as the men hunting them, and the trip quickly turns into a violent test of nerve. From the first toll gate to the final...

Retief, a sardonic Corps officer with a talent for surviving bureaucracy by outthinking it, is handed a mission that could ignite a war. Summoned by Councillor Magnan, he is briefed on the Soetti threat to the obscure Jorgensen's Worlds and given a top-secret package of intelligence, a defense plan, and a dangerous anti-acceleration weapon he must memorize and carry under cover. The assignment is urgent, politically charged, and built on official half-measures, but Retief heads out with dr...

When Ambassador Sternwheeler's mission on Glave is upended by a workers' and peasants' junta, the diplomatic staff descends into panic, posturing, and career-saving speculation. Retief, as dryly practical as ever, cuts through the bluster, dismisses the official alarm, and insists on seeing the situation for himself, even as the new regime warns the embassy to stay away. Landing on an eerily quiet world, Retief quickly discovers that the revolution is less a clean victory than a shaky occu...

When Ambassador Nitworth learns that the long-vanished Qornt have reappeared to claim an "uninhabited" world already occupied by Terrestrials, he is thrown into a comedy of diplomatic panic. His staff babbles about withdrawal and evacuation, but the unflappable Retief recognizes that the threat is stranger than a standard invasion and sends anxious Magnan with him to investigate. On the lush world of Tarroon, the pair discover that the feared Qornt are only one faction in a tangled alien s...

Brett leaves the sheltered certainty of Casperton, where older voices urge him to stay home, settle down, and accept an ordinary life. Instead, he boards a train with a suitcase and a restless conviction that there must be more to the world than comfort, custom, and the glossy fantasies that shape other people's desires. What begins as a thoughtful journey into curiosity and imagination soon turns unsettling, as the train vanishes into impossibility and Brett awakens stranded in a barren f...

On the alien world of Petreac, diplomat Retief spends more time defusing bureaucratic nonsense than dealing with aliens—at least at first. While his superior, Ambassador Crodfoller, frets over protocol and the embassy obsesses about class, etiquette, and "fitting in" with the mysterious Nenni caste, Retief senses that the real action is happening behind the palace walls. His instincts prove right. Away from the ballroom, he and Magnan stumble into a brewing servant uprising, only to learn ...

In a desperate future Earth, the Red Tide is devouring the planet, and Lieutenant Commander Greylorn makes a daring case before the World Secretary's council: humanity's last hope may lie not in a doomed defense, but in a search for the lost Omega Colony. Thanks to new propulsion advances, a mission once thought impossible could now reach the colony in five years, and Greylorn argues that the distant settlement may have grown strong enough to aid its parent world. The council approves the ...

Keith Laumer emerged as one of the modern masters of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, creating such memoriable characters as Retief of the CDT and the Bolos. This collection assembles 21 of his great tales, including stories in both of those series (and one complete novel). Here are:INTRODUCTION: KEITH LAUMERTHE FROZEN PLANET [Retief]GAMBLER’S WORLD [Retief]THE YILLIAN WAY [Retief]THE MADMAN FROM EARTH [Retief]RETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAI...

On the desert world of Adobe, Vice-Consul J. J. Retief is sent into a simmering border crisis with nothing but a sealed order and an exasperated superior who wants diplomacy without leaving the office. Human settlers and the native Flap-jacks are already trading fire over precious oasis farms, and the official plan is as unrealistic as it is tidy. Retief's arrival is anything but routine: he survives a guided warhead, a crash landing, and hostile fire before being mistaken for an enemy and...

Sharp-tongued Terrestrial diplomat Retief is sent to the long-lived world of Fust, where Ambassador Magnan wants him to publicly sponsor a harmless-sounding youth group called SCARS. Retief's instincts tell him otherwise, and when he follows the trail from pompous ceremonies to the shipyards, he finds a society seething with resentment, age politics, and hidden agendas. The supposed passenger liner under construction turns out to be based on an old battle cruiser design, and the Groaci Emb...

Peter Granthan wakes in a damaged lifeboat, badly burned and half-dead, after a mission against the mysterious enemy known as the Gool goes catastrophically wrong. He may be the first human to survive direct contact with them, but that makes him no safer: Earth's authorities suspect he has been mentally compromised, and Colonel Ausar Kayle orders him held in parking orbit rather than allowed home. Cut off, injured, and condemned by his own side, Granthan turns inward, using psychodynamic t...