by James Mullaney
Cover by Mark Maddox
CALLING CAPTAIN KIRK!
Strange lights in the night sky across America’s cattle country have ranchers on edge. When steer start dying gruesome deaths, panic sets in. Is this the work of little green men, or is some inexplicable terrestrial terror to blame?
Patrick “Podge” Becket and Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright are beamed into the region to find out who — or what — is yanking the strings on this UFO foe. What they find is out of this world.
A plot that starts out brewing in twilight fields and in the air high above America’s heartland quickly spreads to Washington’s corridors of power, threatening to spill out across the globe.
If Podge and Wainwright fail to thwart the demented scheme of a buggy billionaire and his beautiful lady henchwoman, half the world’s population will wind up buried in the bottom of a black hole!
***
WHO IS THE RED MENACE? Throughout the 1950s, this was the number one question from Moscow to Beijing and in every communist palace and malaria-ridden backwater in between. The mysterious masked figure was a shadow and a whisper. For the Kremlin and its fellow travelers, he was a damnable monkey wrench tossed into the gears of the not-so-glorious worldwide revolution. Wherever Reds schemed, the Menace was there to set things right. Then, 1960 came and the whisper grew silent ....
Twelve years later, Podge Becket, computer tycoon and security expert, thinks he’s hung up his mask and cape for good. Aided by his partner, inventor and physician Dr. Thaddeus Wainwright, the Red Menace is dragged back into the hero game. But it’s a whole new world out there ...
