Book review: All the Colors of Darkness

This is a nice enough Olde Tyme story, notice the four shillings price on my cover picture. By Lloyd Biggle Jr. who I know of - you remember the name - but I can't think of ay of his other stuff that I've read. Unlike With a Strange Device which is really a detective story posing as scifi this one is actually scifi, and it has a crude moral theme, of aliens-judging-Earth (see-also Conviction by Aldiss), or even fellowship-under-the-skin. Goodreads doesn't seem to have any interesting opinions.

You're unlikely to run across this, so I'll tell you the story: UT Company have invented a matter-transporter. Unaccountably they completely fail to think of the infinite-energy possibilities (transport stuff upwards capture the PE) or even the military, and instead boringly use it as a people transmitter. The legal difficulties are obvious, but laughably they shrug them off - they have offer insurance, which they get from a company they've told there will never be any claims, so its all very cheap. WTF? Also laughably they prefer people to freight. Never mind, it is necessary for the story. Which is: they start losing people, but, only people with fake IDs. They hire a PI, who noses around and ends up following one such, and ends up... on the Moon. Woo. Seeking to persuade the now-revealed-to-be aliens to talk, he accidentally blows up their power plant. Despite the explosion being large enough to be seen from Earth, he and the aliens survive, albeit in a restricted environment with little spare air. While they're getting to know each other, the USA prepares a new Moonbase, which it will put by the site of the explosion, so they can expore it. We wave away some considerable implausibilities here, but this allows Our Hero to steal a space suit and save his alien-now-chums, and allows one of the aliens to teleport to their base on Earth, and everyone is saved. Also, the aliens realise he is a Good Egg, which is nice for humanity. Also, he has his memory consensually erased, which is a bit weird, but may be necessary for the rest of the series. Which I won't be reading.