The Dag Hammarskjold takes off from Woomera, Australia for the new human settlement on Mars.
Planet Earth is being eaten away by uncontrollable pollution, starvation and disease. Its life expectancy is nil.
This is the last spaceship, its passengers the last people on earth with any hope. But it is never to reach its objective. Five thousand years later its captain wakes up to a new world undiscovered in his time and to a bitter experience he must fight alone.