Hale Oakham heads into the mysterious jungle to find the mysterious Sir Basil Addington and his laboratory where he has supposedly discovered amazing secrets about life, including ones which enable him to produce monsters and to change the physical characteristics of humans.
Elwood Caswell, a homicidal maniac who wants to murder his best friend. Knowing it was wrong, he stops to buy a therapeutic machine, one made by General Motors. In a hurry, he buys, for cash, the floor model. The clerk learns that the floor model was gauged for Martians, who knows what effect it would have on a human, and the hunt is on.
The Martians had been sending a message to Earth for 5000 years, waiting for a response, but recently stopped. Why? They have interplanetary travel, yet no way to determine if any life exists here? In our infancy of space exploration, we are thoroughly exploring Mars to see if it can or ever could have supported life as we know it.
The twins were a rare team indeed. They wanted to build a printing plant on a garbage dump. When Muldoon asked them why, their answer was entirely logical: "Because we live here."
As the space fleets of an outraged Terran Confederation close in on the outlaw planet of Fruyling's World, the destinies of slave and master meet explosively, and from the shock of battle and its aftermath come an unexpected and awesome conclusion.