Oliver Marland was an ordinary crew man on a routine flight before disaster overtook the 5X5. The strange sequence of events affected the minds of the entire ship's company - Marland alone was capable of getting them home safely.

The changes had come to Oliver in a different way. They had set him apart from the others. He was feared and distrusted - not without reason! This was the paradox; they needed him - he needed them; but both sides feared the other too much for compromise.

The only chance of breaking the deadlock lay with the unknown inhabitants of the planet they had been sent to survey - and the natives were not renowned for their gregarious amiability!

This is more than a breath-taking, suspense-packed Science Fiction story. It is a warmly human novel which sets out to examine the depths of bitterness which divide individuals and ethnic groups - the struggled between pride and the desire for reconciliation. Oliver Marland is an Outsider longing desperately to belong to a group which cannot survive without him and yet insists on rejecting him. The powers of its mature philosophy cannot be ignored.

The botanist claims that human life depends indirectly on the chlorophyll in the green leaf. The leaf depends on sunlight. But both depend upon the atom. No atoms, no physical matter, no physical universe!

Microscope experts peer closely into the mysteries of the human body, into the mysteries of the green leaf, into the mysteries of the chemical elements. It is hardly feasible to subject an atom to microscopic examination. But what if it was possible? What if a new technique of observation was discovered? A strange, revolutionary "seeing" without recourse to the photon.

The microscope might reveal scientific impossibilities which would shake the universe to its foundations. Smallness hold more terrors than greatness.

This is the story of a microcosm in revolt, the story of men who faced the impossible and were unafraid.