In a starving future ruled by black-market magnates and hollow officialdom, Max Alben is chosen for a mission that could erase the catastrophe known as the Blight. His family's rare immunity to temporal blackout makes him the only viable traveler, but the assignment is anything but simple: he must reach 1976, stop a missile experiment, and somehow preserve a civilization already teetering on extinction. Before departure, he receives a sealed metal cylinder and a warning that changing the past may create a future even worse than the one he knows. As Alben plunges into the gray uncertainty of 1976, the hidden report he carries reveals the full scale of the disaster ahead: a radioactive accident, a mutated virus, and a chain reaction that becomes Shapiro's Mumps or a plant-destroying epidemic, depending on the version of the crisis, leading to famine, ecological collapse, and rigid social control. In this bleak world, fertility determines status, robots replace labor, and survival belongs to the ruthless. Torn between duty, doubt, and the seductive promise of reshaping history, Alben becomes the pivot point in a tense, ironic struggle over free will, power, and the price of "saving" humanity. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
