Ghost

Starship Captain Shetland feels like a ghost on his own planet: Earth is an energy starved madhouse of compulsory sex and forced interbreeding, where eating meat and casting shadows are felonies - and spacers are hated as power "wasters." In fact, Shetland's life is dedicated to finding new energy for Earth - a search that takes him into deepest space. And deepest time. For Shetland is commander of the Meg II, a time-ship assigned to explore the void beyond the universe. What Shetland and his crew find are - ghosts. First the ghost of the ship's dead chemist. Then ghosts of dead planets, dead stars, dead nebulae. A galaxy-sized black hole - the ghost of a cosmos, the ghost of all reality... and beyond it, beyond the specter of Time... The most powerful, terrifying, malignant ghost of all...