Elis Royd

by Ron Sanders

Earth, paradoxically the galaxy’s ultimate conqueror and democratic savior, are besieged with applications for naturalization from extraterrestrial refugees. An enormous asteroid is set up as a stepping stone: a faux Earth endlessly provisioned with terrestrial delicacies and perpetually powered by a subterranean atomic plant. Too expensive to maintain, the project is abandoned, and the human administrators and extraterrestrials left to rot on a world suddenly overrun by imported...