One thousand years after a war of the worlds... Scattered here and there, small isolated groups of humanity live in a state of semi-barbarism. Lost are the skills, science and knowledge that had been Earth's in the golden age of the League of Worlds. And each time a colony of Earthmen tries to rekindle the embers of a half-forgotten technology, the Shing, mind-lying despoilers of Terra, crush them out. Only one man dares stand against the Shing's hunger for Earth conquest, and that man—the alien with the unhuman amber eyes—first has to prove to paranoid humanity that he himself is not a tool of the hated Shing enemy...