Salford had an unenviable assignment. Beyond the security of the in-worlds there were a number of dark, mysterious unexplored planets, hostile to life, hated and feared by the experience spacemen. Salford neither hated nor feared them. He was a man doing a job.

He reached the assignment world and set out to explore what might have been the ruins of a long dead alien civilization.

As he left the safety of his ship he was aware that he was not alone. Someone or something watched his every move. At last he glanced into the sky...

Perhaps it was a mirage, perhaps it was an hallucination. Salford felt that if there was an answer, it must lie somewhere buried among the distant ruins. He reached them and began to explore. The more he learned of the incredible civilization that had once existed, the more mysterious the aerial phenomena became. Finally he discovered what seemed to be the clue, and yet he was no nearer a real solution to the problem. Although the evidence pointed to the ancient civilization being extinct there were things among the ruins that didn't make sense unless some trace of the Ancients lived on.

It was an innocent looking little tube. There are hundreds in every medical laboratory. It wasn't the tube that counted. The contents were all-important. The liquid in that tube could destroy a galaxy, yet in itself it was harmless. Everything depended upon the formula and particularly the type of symbols which were employed to set down the formula. Given the right notation that formula could be the most lethal thing since Death went into business.

Gray Hawkins had three possible choices. He could destroy the tube and say nothing; he could report the whole thing to the Interplanetary Federation and leave it to the politicians; or he could use his own initiative. Gray was the kind of man who had plenty of ambition. He decided to play it alone. He hadn't really bargained on the strength of the opposition, but a man who held the power to destroy whole planets was prepared to take on the opposition of star-empires.