IN 2116, THE INTERSTELLAR CRUISE LINER EMPRESS IS chartered for the ‘milk run’ between Station 9 and the planet Azure in the West Galaxy. At Station 9, one of the passengers is the zoologist Professor Tryst, who has recently completed a long expedition to qualify and quantify every species in the galaxy. Preserving some of the more endangered life forms using a mattertransmuter, he has them converted to electro-magnetic signals stored in the laser-crystal event recordings of the Continuous Event Transmuter (CET) devised by his mentor, Professor Stein. The near-bankrupt Tryst and his assistant Della are given first-class travel on the governmentsubsidised spacelines and aim to meet a new sponsor on Azure.
It seems that Tryst’s expedition, which he undertook aboard the Volante, visited the primitive world M37 before collecting specimens from the planets Zil, Vij, Darp, Lvan, Brus, Ranx, Gidi and Eden. One of Tryst’s crew members, Stott, was a major in the Intelligence section of Space Corps. Stott was on a special assignment to locate drug-runners, but was killed on Eden.