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novella - Seeking title / author of a story about alien first contact with Earth


As title, seeking the title of a story I read in the mid 1970s. I'm fairly sure it was a novella in an anthology.


Plot details I can remember - I think main character's family name was Monk.


His father had apparently been killed when the space station he was aboard crashed on the Moon - it later transpires that the station was deliberately crashed to conceal contact with an alien starship, and his father was still alive. The crew of the starship included various races - one appeared to be a beautiful human woman, while another ( the engineer ) looked like a giant squid. After the main character's father died of cancer, the engineer also turned out to be a microbiologist and was able to cure the cancer and bring him back to life. Other things include a vehicle which was able to go out-of-phase with normal matter and travel through solid objects like the earth.



Answer



Bright New Universe by Jack Williamson



"Think what it would mean! To prove we aren't alone! To find other races - older and wiser than we are! Out on the moon, I hope to find an answer. If we do pick up a signal from space, it will be the great turning point in human history. It will give our lives a meaning."


Yet to make his words good, Adam Cave had to break with his family and society, and put himself against his own world. But once out there on the far side of the moon, where an isolated band kept pushing Earth's call letters into the void, the picture changed startlingly, shockingly. For Cave learned the truth that had been held back from a placid world for so long...




Searching inside the google book, there are Monks - possibly his adopted father's name.


Amazon review mention Adam discovering that his father and his co-pilot making contact with an alien species (a fact that was covered up) and the possibility of his father being alive.


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