The rest of the team discovers a surface anomaly near the north pole of the planet, where a hexagonal "hole" appears for a brief interval every day.

The passengers are a businessman named Datham Hain, his "niece" Wu Julee, and a diplomatic courier identified as Vardia Diplo 1261.

During the trip, the ship's captain, Nathan Brazil, discovers that Hain is a "sponge merchant", a trafficker in a substance that causes an incurable, degenerative brain disease.

The surface has been patterned into a series of hexagonal patches where Markovians were allowed to experiment in creating their own new forms of intelligent life, and if they were successful they would be sent off into the universe to evolve on their own.

At the Well World, Brazil and his companions set off to track down Skander and Varnett, to stop them from gaining access to the central computer and causing harm to the universe.

The complication is that travelling through the polar gate on Dalgonia has transformed all of the humans, with the exception of Nathan Brazil, into members of the various species which inhabit the planet.