All life on Earth will die of thirst unless a couple of loners on the run can use a strange time machine to stop a secret project! An action-packed short novel from a Nebula Award nominee. Meg is an angry scientist's daughter. Her father is not a mad scientist, just really angry - so angry that he and Meg have rarely spoken since the death of her mother. Meg has become a loner, obsessed with combatting polluters like the ones who triggered her mother's death. And her father has had a different obsession. When Meg breaks into a paint company to expose their practices, she runs into Josh, another loner out to save the world. When Meg and Josh suddenly find themselves on the run from the cops, Meg heads for the one man who should always take her in--her father. But when Meg and Josh reach him, they find him dying. Just before he dies, he gives Meg a strange device that looks like a cellphone and tells her to use extreme caution. When the invention proves to be the time machine that holds the key to humanity's future, Meg and Josh must find a way to do the impossible--to work as a team. They are up against the cops, a powerful billionaire, a Russian profiteer, and a romantic rival. Can they save the world, and save each other? About Stith's prior work: "Stith writes in the best hard-sf manner, dropping characters into a situation that can be solved only by thought and reason, but he also, more modernly, creates real and believable characters. He is becoming one of the most eloquent modern hard-sf practitioners." — Booklist