Major Reille y Sanchez/s pioneering expedition sets down on 5023 Eris to claim the mineral rich asteroid for humankind. But another kind has already arrived: beings from an alternate Earth where aquatic invertebrates have developed intelligence and gained dominion—and consider humans as mere interlopers!

Eichra Oren and his dog Sam are hired by the Elders—a race of advanced beings—to hide a secret from thirty shipwrecked earth colonists on 5023 Eris, but they will not tell him what it is that he is concealing

In the twenty-first-century world, Marxist communist humans compete with the capitalist Elders, an alien race resembling giant squid, for control of an asteroid ful of valuable minerals and other resources. Reprint.