by Robert Sells

Genre: Science Fiction

Aster Worthington spearheads the First Contact Team to unravel a message from an alien race. “The Lambdons” promise free energy if humanity builds a few special robots and downloads their message into a super computer to direct construction of the fusion reactor. An excited world agrees and builds a massive structure called the Dome to house the alien enterprise.

Seven years later, there’s no “free energy” and strange things happen in and around the Dome. Aster and her colleagues mount an expedition under the protection of Army Rangers to investigate the interior. Instead of friendly aliens, they discover hordes of intelligent humanoids with insect-like characteristics.

When the military team is brutally murdered by the Lambdons, the scientists scatter. It’s soon apparent that the Lambdons intend to take over the planet using biological warfare. The only hope for humanity lies with a two-thousand year old scroll hidden by the church. The question is, can Aster and her team unravel the scroll’s mystery in time to save the planet?

I attended college at Ohio Wesleyan where I struggled with physics. Having made so many mistakes in college with physics, there weren’t too many left to make and I did quite well at graduate school at Purdue.

I worked for nearly twenty years at Choate Rosemary Hall, an exclusive boarding school in the heart of Connecticut. More often than not, students arrived in limousines. There was a wooded area by the upper athletic fields where I would take my children for a walk. There, under a large oak tree, stories about the elves would be weaved into the surrounding forest.

Returning to my home town to help with a father struggling with Alzheimer’s, the only job open was at a prison. There I taught an entirely different clientele whose only interaction with limousines was stealing them. A year later Alfred State College hired me to teach physics. I happily taught there for over ten years. A rural, low income high school needed a physics teacher and the superintendent, a friend, begged me to help out. So, I am finishing my teaching career in a most fulfilling way… helping kids who would otherwise not have access to a qualified physics (and math) teacher.

My wife pestered me about putting to “pen” some of the stories which I had created for the children and other relatives. I started thinking about a young boy and a white deer, connected, yet apart. Ideas were shuffled together, characters created and the result was the Return of the White Deer. This book was published by the Martin Sisters.

Years ago I gave a lecture on evolution. What, I wondered, would be the next step? Right away I realized that silicon ‘life’ had considerable advantages over mortal man. Later this idea emerged as the exciting and disturbing story called Reap the Whirlwind, my most recent novel.

I have many other stories inside my mind, fermenting, patiently waiting for the pen to give them breath. Perhaps someday I will even write about those elves which still inhabit the woods in the heart of Connecticut.