Personality has a physical basis and what is in itself bio-chemical can be modified by bio-chemical means. The new formula could dissolve a man's personality into a state of plasticity from which almost any kind of temperament could be re-fashioned. Worlds were at war. With technologies resting in an uneasy equilibrium victory or defeat depended upon morale. Morale depended upon personality. Personality depended on the new formula!

A weapon as insidious as that could work both ways. An unscrupulous government could use it to control men's minds to a degree which had never been possible before. The Automatic State lay just around the corner. Bill Stokes and his underground movement were faced with a savage dilemma. Disloyalty could mean defeat for their own people, but to keep faith with the present regime could lead to the end of individual human independence.

Professor Conrad and a party of enthusiastic archaeologists investigated an ancient burial mound of unusual size and peculiar shape. The mound contained a vast cylinder of some unknown alloy, which defied all their efforts to cut it.

Frimley, from the Ministry of Works, had a friend who was a university research physicist, and between them they solved the riddle of the mysterious alloy. Once inside the cylinder they were amazed to find evidence of an alien life form which bore remarkable resemblances to homo sapiens but differed in one essential respect. Gradually they made contact with the alien and learnt the truth about the fantastic cylinder.

Their new knowledge, however, was not the end of the enigma, only the door to greater mysteries. What had begun as an attempt to investigate the past took the investigators far beyond the confines of the Solar System into a realm of speculation which left their minds spinning helplessly on the brink of infinity.