Ace editor Donald Wollheim, however, suggested the final title which references the film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

In 1972, before the start of the narrative, Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld (German for "Blood-Money") had led a project testing nuclear weapons as a protectionary measure against Communist China and the Soviet Union.

More recently the United States has been involved in a prolonged period of hostilities with China and the Soviet Union erupting in a war in Cuba.

Meanwhile, Stuart McConchie, Hoppy Harrington and Jim Fergesson, employees at Modern TV Sales and Service in Berkeley, California, go through a fairly typical day, pausing to watch Walt and Lydia Dangerfield being launched into orbit in the first stage of a colonization mission to Mars.

Orbiting overhead, Walt Dangerfield witnesses the tragic events as they unfold, while other characters are reduced to desperate measures in their struggle for survival.

Bruno Bluthgeld's dog Terry is capable of imitating simple human speech, while some species of felines may have developed their own evolved languages.

Walt Dangerfield, equipped with enough rations to last for several more years, along with an extensive collection of books and musical recordings, has become an orbiting disc jockey.

In Marin County survivors including Bonny Keller, Dr. Stockstill, June Raub and Hoppy Harrington have organized into a self-governing community.

Harrington, a Thalidomide baby missing all four of his limbs, harbors a quietly smoldering resentment of the patronizing and condescending attitudes he endured before the war.

His ultimate goal, however, is to dominate and humiliate the people within his community through intimidation via his increasingly capricious and violent misuse of his ever-strengthening powers.

Stuart McConchie has become a travelling entrepreneur in the post-apocalyptic world, selling "smart" robotic rat traps for a company based in post-war Berkeley.

Still holding onto his ambitious pre-war salesman's mentality, McConchie travels to Marin County to meet Andrew Gill, a cigarette and alcohol entrepreneur, to discuss the re-introduction of automation within his factory as an agent of Berkeley-based business interests.

Harrington employs his own psychokinetic powers in flinging the mad scientist high into the air and then simply letting him fall back to the ground.

Bonny Keller begins to worry that Hoppy will set himself up as a vindictive little tin god, and so she flees the county with Gill and McConchie in hopes of eventually settling beyond the reach of his powers.

Little Bill has a near-lethal adventure inside of an owl before finally engineering a body-swap with Hoppy which quickly proves fatal to Harrington.

At the conclusion of the book, Dr. Stockstill begins a course of psychotherapy, broadcast over the radio, with Walt Dangerfield, who seems to be slowly recovering from his illness in the absence of a jealous Hoppy Harrington's debilitating mental emanations.

Having faced discrimination before the war, Hoppy seeks power and respect through his work as a mechanic and his plot to replace Walt Dangerfield.

Dick stated Stuart was his favorite character in the novel and the one whom he most identified with, and whose immediate perception of Bluthgeld as insane is more insightful than Bonny's view of the man, despite the latter's being formed from extensive personal knowledge.