This novel alternates among the present day, a trading tribal society in Britain, 2000 B.C., and a glacial outpost in the last ice age.

[2] At the end of the twentieth century, petty criminal Ross Murdock is given the choice of facing a new psychiatric medical procedure called rehabilitation or volunteering to join a secret government project.

Hoping for a chance to escape, Ross volunteers to join Operation Retrograde and is taken by Major John Kelgarries to a base built under the ice near the North Pole.

He climbs out of the crevice into which he was shoved and follows the trail leading away from the Soviet base, coming to a giant globe half buried in the ice.

Half dead from the abuse he has received, he enters the globe and then falls through a panel and into a tub full of transparent-red gel.

Back in the Soviet Bronze-Age base, the men leave the time-travel building and escape from the village just as the alien Baldies attack.

Leaving the alien skinsuit on the beach so that the Baldies can't trace the Americans to their base, the men take Ross to the sub and home.

M., wrote: This exciting story is set in the last quarter of this century, but the action takes place in several levels of time and periods of history and prehistory.

Hurled back into the earliest ages of man, Ross’ volatile intelligence is, for the first time, stimulated as he risks death, posing as a member of prehistoric worlds.