Midnight at the Well of Souls

Nathan Brazil, captain of the freighter Stehekin, diverts course after discovering a passenger trafficking a mind-destroying substance, only to answer a distress call from the planet Dalgonia. There, his crew finds a research team murdered by a rogue scientist hunting forbidden ancient technology — and are inadvertently swept through a gate onto the Well World, a planet-sized machine built by a vanished race to seed the universe with new life.

Transformed into bizarre alien forms by the crossing (all except Brazil himself), the crew must track the rogue scientist across the Well World's 1,560 hexagonal habitats before he can seize control of its central computer — even as Brazil begins to suspect his own untouched nature hides a forgotten, far stranger truth about who he really is. Jack L. Chalker's Well World opener blends pulp adventure with a slow-building mystery about identity and godhood.