They came out of the void, from Venus, only to find there was no answer to their radio signals. Earth seemed dead. And on the Moon, Man's greatest achievement, the Lunar Military Base was a mass of rubble and blasted wreckage.

Here, the crew of the Stellar Polaris, led by Commander John Forrest, discovered one sole survivor. And he was mad! To their questions he could only answer that the children had destroyed the armed might of the Military Base.

When they finally reached Earth, they found that what he had said was true. The children had taken over control of the world. But then, these were no ordinary children - and their little weapons were almost enough to overthrow the armed superiority of the Stellar Polaris herself!

Man had fought wars throughout the whole of history, but never such a war as this which had destroyed the cities of Earth and turned vast areas into the Badlands, the stretches of intense radioactivity where nothing could grow and no one could live. It had also produced the Deviates, the mutants who had warped and abnormal bodies and strange talents.

But there were others who had far stranger talents, mental powers which far exceeded even those of the mutants, and whose bodies did not bear the sign of the Deviate. Their origin could not be traced to an atomic war, and even they themselves had no idea of whence they had come.

Forced to take part in the abortive war between the Western and Eastern Federations, Clifford McQuater and Ann Inglis eventually escape and discover the others who have powers similar to themselves. Their task was an almost impossible one, that of probing back through the histories of mankind, back five thousand years to discover the origin of their particular race; and the answer lay not on Earth, but somewhere in the stars.