E. Hoffman Price

From the back cover: FOOLS' GOAL In the twenty-first century, Avery Jarvis "Doc" Brandon lived in luxurious seclusion on subtropical Nameless Island. An immensely wealthy gene-engineer who dabbled in illegal baby-making. Doc was 186 years of age and looked thirty-five. But a storm loomed on his horizon: Bureaucrats had blundered across Doc's real age. They wanted his "secret discovery" and would undertake anything -- including blackmail, kidnapping and murder -- to get it.

Rod Garvin just made too many waves for the Thought Control Board that controlled the 21st century. Throwing him in an insane asylum didn't restrain him. Nor, when that didn't work, did sentencing him to a suicide job on Mars. Garvin was bright, driven, and stubborn. The only thing Thought Control could was was get rid of him -- quietly and permanently. And that was fine with Garvin...since it meant he could make his dreamed-of voyage into deep space. But when his exploration ship stumbles onto an asteroid peopled by remnants of a star-faring race and possessed of incredible mineral wealth, it opens the possibility of unlimited look for Earth and Thought Control. If only Rod Garvin hadn't been the man to make the find...

This book is about science in its broadest human context, how science and civilization grew up together. It is the story of our long journey of discovery and the forces and individuals who helped to shape modern science, including Democritus, Hypatia, Kepler, Newton, Huygens, Champollion, Lowell and Humason. The book also explores spacecraft missions of discovery of the nearby planets, the research in the Library of ancient Alexandria, the human brain, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the origin of life, the death of the Sun, the evolution of galaxies and the origins of matter, suns and worlds. The author retraces the fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution that have transformed matter into life and consciousness, enabling the cosmos to wonder about itself. He considers the latest findings on life elsewhere and how we might communicate with the beings of other worlds. ~ WorldCat.org