An East-Coast University Professor disappears, mirroring the disappearance of another easterner sixty-eight years before.
A deformed runaway youth, hiding in a cave, finds unsuspected friends in the darkness.
A hermit, also living in a cave under the mountain, finds himself hearing voices urging him to suicide. He suspects G-Men-men in black, secret government agents.
The Commander of a secret military SDI base, built under Superstition Mountain itself, faces an inexplicable rash of mental illness and suicides within his command. Then, he hears voices and begins having visions--one of which is Libya initiating a nuclear attack against Israel.
Manhattan private investigator, Aiden Mardian, is hired by a feminist psychologist to help locate the missing professor, claiming that he has been kidnapped by the government and is being held against his will.
All is not well in the Southwest. And it is not going to get better soon.
The fate of the world, the future of humanity, rests in the hands of this odd collection of characters. Can they solve the puzzle and act in time, or will man revert to the barbarism of centuries before?