It was first published in book form by David McKay Co., Inc, and was later incorporated into an Ace Double (with Echo in the Skull, by John Brunner).

With no other option available to them, the men made the arduous climb to the wreck, hoping to find food, generators to recharge the batteries in their heater suits, and possibly a means of communicating with Earth.

Lars and Peter were treated as honored guests by the City-people, who possessed telekinetic powers (which they call teledynamics), the ability to change the forms of matter and energy by thought.

The City-people, descendants of the babies that aliens found in the wreck of the Argonaut, then freed the other men and allowed them to take their ships back to Earth, with Lars and Peter as ambassadors of a new order of reality.

The breaking of the plot deadlock - by having Lars and Peter develop the latent psychic powers that the City-people had been nurturing in them - resembles a similar breaking of a plot deadlock found in The Angry Espers by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.,[1] in which an Earthman stranded on a strange planet must develop his latent psychic abilities in order to deal with the beings around him.