Total Eclipse

What a great story. These scientist are left to solve the mystery of a dead civilization and in the end they do, but for what. They are stranded and no one knows what they learned along with what lesson they learned about greed. They try and establish a life for themselves on this world but fate has another plan. And in the end their attempt at a new civilization on this planet is thwarted by, perhaps, the greed of man on their own home world.

John Brunner weaves a haunting tale of how thirty people attack the nearly insuperable very good copy of this rare booktask of unriddling the mysteries of a long-buried culture. Was it a fatal virus, an internecine war, a religion of lunatic brutality, or a deleterious mutation that destroyed an entire civilization? And when the riddle is finally unravelled will it provide a solution to human problems? Will the answer reach Earth in time? In the year 2020, an international space team, exploring Sigma Draconis, nineteen light years from earth, discovers the remains of a highly advanced society that has left behind as its most spectacular artifact the largest telescope imaginable.