H. P. Devlin, the billionaire owner and CEO of Universal Resources International, a corporation founded on the most advanced technology in the world, establishes Aanland as an experimental socialist community. His agents 'rescue' Rex Anderson, a brilliant electrical engineer, from a prolonged alcoholic binge brought on by the death of his wife and unborn child. Partly to rehabilitate Rex, partly to solve a systems control problem, Devlin puts him in charge of a URI fuel cell development project. Rex resists at first, but finds the research so compelling and the remarkable Aanlandan society, one in which robots do all the routine work and humans serve as their masters, so appealing that he shakes off his long depression and begins to enjoy life again. It helps that he meets Clara, a woman with whom he develops a special rapport, and that he becomes guardian to two remarkable orphans, boy and girl twins, rescued from a brutal foster home. A system Devlin calls Cooperatism, in which money regulates the distribution of goods and services but has no capital function, underlies Aanland's economy, and the government is based on something Devlin calls Stopar Democracy. Everyone owes public service, and a lottery fills all government offices by drawing candidates from pools of qualified citizens. Rex finds it a remarkable system, quite different from anything he has previously experienced, but he adjusts readily enough. The outside world, however is not so sanguine, and when it learns of Aanland's extraordinary technology, it becomes afraid. Fear and concomitant paranoia lead, inevitably to conflict.