Front matter
Reading edition
ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
THE GREATEST ADVENTURE
Copyright, 1929, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
An Ace Book, by arrangement with the author.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in U.S.A.
JOHN TAINE is the nom de plume of the prominent research mathematician, Dr. Eric Temple Bell. Under his own name he has had published numerous popular books on mathematics and science. Under his pen-name he is the author of fifteen published science-fiction novels.
Dr. Bell was born in Peterhead, Scotland, in 1883. After attending various schools in England, he came to the United States (of which he is a naturalized citizen) in 1902, graduating from Stanford University in 1904. He took his master's degree at the University of Washington, and attained his doctorate in mathematics at Columbia University in 1912.
Since 1926 he has been Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.
THEY RIPPED THE VEIL OFF THE PAST
Dr. Eric Lane's party of five crept across the frozen Antarctic seeking the discovery of the ages. For that explorer-archeologist was following the startling account of a sea captain who had fished a lifeless organism from the nearby waters—a devilish monstrosity which fit no pattern of nature's.
Dr. Lane knew when he saw it that the creature had been manufactured. But how could that be? Had there once been intelligences on Earth so much higher than our own that they could create new life-forms?
But for all his excitement, what Dr. Lane was expecting to find were fossils, and maybe some ruins. He did not suspect—until too late—that he was opening a Pandora's box of living horrors.