The Unselfish Gene
Robert Douglas Burns
 At the novel's beginning, Kristen Norman copes with an attack of clinical depression as she and a team of moon colonists await the start of a mission to return to plague-stricken Earth. The team's mission: to save the human race. All but a handful of Earth-bound humans have been killed or turned into zombie-like invalids by a mutated forms of bird flu known as Low-Path and High-Path. Isolated by politics and limited resources, the moon colony was spared infection, but the colonists have their own health problems. High levels of radiation have damaged the DNA of the limited gene pool. The same radiation has damaged Kristen's and others' minds as well, resulting in high instances of mental illness. The moon colony desperately needs resources to survive. The Earth, with nearly all the population dead or dying, is a large warehouse waiting to be raided. The moon needs genetic engineering equipment, pharmaceuticals, scientific equipment, seed stock, and, most of all, new human genetic material. They have been promised the later by a mysterious contact on Earth, one of the few surviving Earthbound humans, code-named "Deep Throat." Deep Throat, claims to have a large sperm and ova bank that she is willing to donate to the cause, but remains secretive as to his or her identity and extent of resource. The multiple levels of the name Deep Throat are not lost on the moon men and women. To get to the Earth and back, moon engineers have bankrupted the moon's resources to build a spaceship design resurrected from the 1950s , The Anita, an atomic-powered brute of a space ship. But the moon men have been too long in building the Anita. A rogue comet, named Kali, was recently discovered to be on a collision course with Earth. The planet-killing impact is less than two weeks away. The Anita's technology is unproven in a planetary atmosphere, and the ship was hastily completed in order to beat Kali to the punch. While Kristen copes with depression the old-fashioned way — with pharmaceuticals — her teammates Jimmy Olson, Jorge Blanca and Gayle Ring are also dealing with introspective mental states as they await the final stage of the Anita's approach to the Earth. All four are in currently in The Ark, a small tug-boat tender to the Anita, when the unthinkable happens. An explosion of mysterious origin depressurizes the Anita, killing nearly everyone aboard. With no time to re-staff the Anita, Jimmy, Kristen, Jorge and Gayle must conduct an abbreviated, hurried mission to Earth. The goal is to at least rescue the frozen sperm and ova and key genetic engineering and therapy equipment before Kali strikes. A rescue mission by Jimmy and Jorge finds only five aboard the Anita who survived the depressurization: Crystal Karen, Tisha Smith, Bobby Randel, Daniel Kaplan, and Abraham Badr. The Anita lands successfully, but as the mission on the surface proceeds it becomes obvious that explosion and the death of the crew was sabotage. Shortly before the Anita lands, Hannah Alman, seventeen years old and a survivor of the Low-Path plague, is taking refuge in the Dallas Zoo. Hannah is rebelling, out on her own, truant from a small commune of survivors living near Fair Park in the southern part of the city. She is not aware that her commune is about to be destroyed by the Anita's landing.