In Knoxville, Tennessee, the men involved in the top-secret Ridgerunner project are about to complete work on the first rocket designed to probe beyond the solar system and Secret Service agents in that city are becomming frantic over the presence of one Gilbert Nash, a man without a past.
The investigation of Nash began wen it was discovered that he subscribed to every journal of science currently published in the free world -- archeology, geology, astronomy, meteorology, chemistry, medicine, and most distrubing of all, nuclear physics. Was he merely shogin a healthy interest in science, or perhaps something more sinister? Determined to find out, the government agents are soon plunged into the most baffling and frustrating case of an of their careers.
Every fact they uncover only adds to the mystery surrounding Nash's identity. He seems to have come into existence our of nowhere on March 8th, 1940, the date the United States decide in earnest to build an atomic bomb, and them migrated to Knoxville just in advance of the establishement of the Ridgerunner project. On the door to his office appear anly his name and the word "investigations." And, although Nash fave his age as 31 in 1940, he appears no to have aged a day since that time.