Produced by V. L. Simpson, Greg Weeks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THREE AGAINST THE STARS A sky pirate armed with superior weapons of his own invention.... First contact with an alien race dangerous enough to threaten the safety of two planets.... The arrival of an unseen dark sun whose attendant marauders aimed at the very end of civilization in this Solar System.... These were the three challenges that tested the skill and minds of the brilliant team of scientist-astronauts Arcot, Wade, and Morey. Their initial adventures are a classic of science-fiction which first brought the name of their author, John W. Campbell, into prominence as a master of the inventive imagination. JOHN W. CAMPBELL first started writing in 1930 when his first short story, _When the Atoms Failed_, was accepted by a science-fiction magazine. At that time he was twenty years old and still a student at college. As the title of the story indicates, he was even at that time occupied with the significance of atomic energy and nuclear physics. For the next seven years, Campbell, bolstered by a scientific background that ran from childhood experiments, to study at Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote and sold science-fiction, achieving for himself an enviable reputation in the field. In 1937 he became the editor of _Astounding Stories_ magazine and applied himself at once to the task of bettering the magazine and the field of s-f writing in general. His influence on science-fiction since then cannot be underestimated. Today he still remains as the editor of that magazine's evolved and redesigned successor, _Analog_. THE BLACK STAR PASSES JOHN W. CAMPBELL ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036 THE BLACK STAR PASSES Copyright, 1953, by John W. Campbell, Jr. Copyright, 1930, by Experimenter Publications, Inc. An Ace Book, by arrangement with the author. _Cover art by Jerome Podwil._ Printed in U.S.A. Contents Introduction 7 BOOK ONE Piracy Preferred 11 BOOK TWO Solarite 71 BOOK THREE The Black Star Passes 145 [Illustration] INTRODUCTION These stories were written nearly a quarter of a century ago, for the old _Amazing Stories_ magazine. The essence of any magazine is not its name, but its philosophy, its purpose. That old _Amazing Stories_ is long since gone; the magazine of the same name today is as different as the times today are different from the world of 1930.