I read this one thirty-some years ago and remember really enjoying it. I found my old paperback copy of it the other day when I opened up a sealed box of paperbacks that had been in storage for some years.
It's a science-fiction novel about a spacefaring human civilization that gets around in a unique way. Most science-fiction has humans getting around in metal ships through things like wormholes or with hyperdrive or whatever, but this novel has a truly original method: These extraterrestrial humans know about another kind of energy, something they call "third-order forces" that they are able to latch onto to instantaneously transport themselves across interplanetary and even interstellar distances.
Third-order forces are as unknown to us terrestrial humans as infrared radiation was to cave dwellers, and we terrestrial humans are poor relations to extraterrestrial humans, who know about us and move among us and watch us clandestinely, but we of course are not aware of them. The extraterrestrial humans also have life spans of about fifty centuries.
Third-order forces converge on confluence points called "nodes" and it is at these nodes that the extraterrestrial humans transport themselves. There are a few dozen of these nodes on the surface of the planet Earth, at places like Easter Island and Stonehenge. I have visited Stonehenge and wow, there really is something weird about that place, about the way it feels. Reading this novel makes me think of Stonehenge.
-- Ron
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