The only survivor plucked from a world where life has been burned out from horizon to horizon, Rat Korga is a very unusual human. On his own world he was subjected to Radical Anxiety Termination-a synapse-jamming technique banned on many planets.

Now the officials of the Web must find a new world for him. Their first choice is the planet Velm: a world on which humans co-exist uneasily with the trisauian evelmi - and also the world of Marq Dyeth, for whom Korga is calculated to be the perfect erotic object, to about seven decimal places . . .