The Mote in God's Eye

Brighter than a hundred moons, a beam of ruby light comes through a black hole in space: the eye on the face of God, or the blood-red sun of "our first intergalactic visitors". Niven and Pournelle's novel came from Simon and Schuster in 1974; this is Pocket's twenty-first printing, under a David Egge cover dated 1986.