Pilot Panglor Balef didn't owe anybody anything - or even think anybody but Panglor Balef was real enough to matter.. And he had cause enough for bitterness. He'd been kicked out of spaceflight and finally framed on a charge that would net him a short lifetime of slavery.

All the same, he wasn't overjoyed at the price of escaping his sentence: He must condemn a shipful of men to the worse-than-death limbo of the collapsing-fields.

It was his only hope for survival, but at the last minute he couldn't do it - and found himself adrift with his intended victims in a contradictory universe of utter madness!