Joe Laing has recently escaped the doomed timeline of Tarmis, in which the Neanderthal race had survived to modern times due to Joe's meddling with their development some 35,000 years in the past. Although he is now happily married to Ciara, Joe is getting restless - he feels compelled to investigate the second of the time tunnels. Ciara, however, insists on accompanying him, despite the potential danger. Assisted by Or-gon, his Neanderthal friend, the only survivor of the erased Tarmis timeline, Joe bridges the chasm blocking the tunnel and, with Ciara by his side, steps into the unknown. They emerge at a place Joe recognises - the complex of living accommodation and laboratories that lies behind the sacred cave of the Neanderthals. Yet now, everything seems new, which means that he and Ciara are deeper into the past than Joe had previously travelled. They are taken prisoner by tall people similar in appearance to Prua Landi, the woman who had tried to destroy Joe in Tarmis. Marron, one of their captors, is unduly suspicious of Joe and Ciara and attempts to question them using telepathic methods forbidden by his people. His companion, Romana, who is a doctor, insists on the prisoners being brought before the base commander, Leiki. He is a friendly, but intense individual, who explains that they are more than 250,000 years into Joe and Ciara's past. Leiki questions Joe and it transpires, to everyone's amazement, that Joe is also the Futama in Leiki's natural time, which is almost one million years into the future. Leiki's people are known as 'The Faithful' because of their unshakeable belief in the coming of the Futama. They have the technology to travel easily through time and have escaped persecution at Prua Landi's hand in their own natural time by fleeing to the past of the early Neanderthal people. They have built the tunnel complex, but their main refuge is now on Mars, at a period 300 million years in the past, when Mars is covered with oceans and forests and Earth is in the late Carboniferous era. It is to Mars that Joe must travel, because there he must train an army to free the Faithful from Prua Landi's evil regime. He must do this because he is their Futama. Because of the potential danger, Joe insists that he take Ciara home. But, by means of inferior time travel technology Prua Landi has followed him to the 21st century and, if she cannot recruit him, then she intends to kill him. Leiki has assigned Analy and Trione as Joe's bodyguards and they are forced to use their deadly plasma weapons to defend him against an attack by Prua Landi. In the resultant explosion, Joe's house is almost destroyed and Prua Landi escapes back to her own time in the most freakish of circumstances. However, she is severely burned, and it takes prompt action by her doctors and her internal nanomedics to save her. Her narrow escape from death increases Prua Landi's determination to destroy Joe, whom she now suspects is the fabled Futama, the one the Faithful believe, despite his primitive origins, is destined to end her regime. On Mars, having experienced the destructive power of plasma weapons, Joe decides that he must develop tactics to minimise death and devastation amongst his people of the future. To this end he trains an army in various martial arts, allied to a rigorous fitness regime. When at last Joe is satisfied at the levels of skill and fitness shown by his troops, he knows the time has come for the final assault to free his people . . . and bring Prua Landi to justice.