A Place in the Sun

By Stephen Marlowe and Sheba Blake

One of the most unforgettable characters from the golden era of science fiction, Johnny Mayhem is a shapeshifter who can assume the guise of any person. In the pulse-pounding short story "A Place in the Sun," Mayhem is ordered to save a spacecraft that is on a direct collision course with the Sun. Will he be able to pull off this Herculean task before it's too late?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing Corp.
• Release date: Feb 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9783985104772

Stephen Marlowe

Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was the author of more than fifty novels, including nearly two dozen featuring globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum. Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe was raised in Brooklyn and attended the College of William and Mary. After several years writing science fiction under his given name, he legally adopted his pen name, and began focusing on Chester Drum, the Washington-based detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955). Although a private detective akin to Raymond Chandler’s characters, Drum was distinguished by his jet-setting lifestyle, which carried him to various exotic locales from Mecca to South America. These espionage-tinged stories won Marlowe acclaim, and he produced more than one a year before ending the series in 1968. After spending the 1970s writing suspense novels like The Summit (1970) and The Cawthorn Journals (1975), Marlowe turned to scholarly historical fiction. He lived much of his life abroad, in Switzerland, Spain, and France, and died in Virginia in 2008. 

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Stephen Marlowe

A Place in the Sun

First published by Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. 2022

Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Marlowe

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Stephen Marlowe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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Contents

I. A PLACE IN THE SUN

A Place in the Sun

About the Author

I

A Place in the Sun

A Place in the Sun

Chapter Separator

Mayhem, the man of many bodies, had been given some weird assignments in his time, but saving The Glory of the Galaxy wasn’t difficult—it was downright impossible!

The SOS crackled and hummed through subspace at a speed which left laggard light far behind. Since subspace distances do not coincide with normal space distances, the SOS was first picked up by a Fomalhautian freighter bound for Capella although it had been issued from a point in normal space midway between the orbit of Mercury and the sun’s corona in the solar system.

The radioman of the Fomalhautian freighter gave the distress signal to the Deck Officer, who looked at it, blinked, and bolted ‘bove decks to the captain’s cabin. His face was very white when he reached the door and his heart pounded with excitement. As the Deck Officer crossed an electronic beam before the door a metallic voice said: The Captain is asleep and will be disturbed for nothing but emergency priority.

Nodding, the Deck officer stuck his thumb in the whorl-lock of the door and entered the cabin. Begging your pardon, sir, he cried, "but