Exhausted, the father managed to send a distress message to his friend Max, but failed to reach him directly, and instructed his son to quickly get into the forest on the hill.

Impatient at the side trip, Martin tried to encourage Claude to enter a dangerous cave, and arrive sooner at Sidoine.

But Max and Silbad manage to escape, then provide food to the Master and his monster, and promises to bring back help for the prisoners stranded on the planet.

In his approach to the planet Perdide, The Big Max is caught in unexpectedly intense interstellar and interplanetary traffic and are detained by the police.

Max and Silbad question the authorities and learn to their amazement that Perdide is a developed planet, urbanized and largely colonized since its "Enhancement", nearly sixty years earlier.

Max and Silbad realise that their space journey at 99% of the speed of light created a time lag of a century between them and the planet Perdide.

In 1982 the novel was made into an animated film under the title Les Maîtres du temps (Time Masters), directed by René Laloux and designed by the comics artist Moebius.

It was Laloux's second animated adaptation of a Wul novel, following his 1973 film Fantastic Planet, based on Oms en série (1957).