Dave Shuster has been confronted by secret government agents over a photo taken by a Mars lander of a graveyard complete with crosses on Mars. Shuster claims that - in an alternate timeline - he was a low-level bureaucrat in the administration of a joint U.S. - Soviet Mars colony when he was caught up in a murder mystery involving the illegal use of robot technology.

In that timeline, the Cold War took a very different turn - largely influenced by Admiral Robert Heinlein, who was allowed to return to Naval service following World War II.

When Shuster is thrown into a power vacuum immediately upon his arrival on the Mars Colony in 1985, he finds himself fighting a rogue industrialist using his wits with some help from unlikely sources in a society infiltrated by the pervasive presence of realistic androids.