Max Andrea is one of the great atomic physicists. His faith is simple and perhaps even right. But, not right at all, judged by to-day's Stop Press demands.

Max Andrea's brain is a weapon: a weapon for power, for good or evil, stretching beyond the horizons of wild men's wildest dreams: an abstruse weapon, only to be grasped through torture, and drugs, and brain-washing. Or, so it appeared to some.

From Top Secret government work to Dartmoor gaol, and thence to a quiet cottage in Devonshire. A mind accustomed to working as a high precision instrument far out in the dim reaches of human understanding, despite itself, is touched by love. But, not for long. Its peculiar fate lies far away.

The story takes us half across the world. It mirrors the impact of to-day's science and to-day's ethics on that thread of life and human behaviour which must, for ever, go on unchanged.