For three hundred years the Solarians had isolated themselves from the galaxy with the promise to reappear one day to bring human victory. Now, with the very existence of the human race at stake in a war with the machine-like beings of the computer worlds, they re-emerged with a completely new social order. They possessed strange talents, such as telepathy and total recall. And they had an ingenious strategy for defeating the Duglaars. From the beginning, Jay Palmer had sensed their "otherness" but he had to accept them and their plan of surrendering earth to the merciless, computer-like Duglaars—it was the only hope left.