With nuclear war impending, a brilliant inventor creates the Bellingham Capsule, which will save the most precious art, music, and literature of our civilization. A few men in suspended animation will safeguard the capsule for the next thousand years, when it will automatically release them.

But when an earthquake finally breaks the capsule, Philip Lee Talbot and Edward Magnus emerge into a world far stranger than they had bargained for. Has it been a thousand years . . . or much, much longer?

For Mankind no longer rules this Earth . . .

Five centuries after atomic war destroyed most of the Earth, survivors have clawed their way back to civilization . . . And their eyes have turned to the stars. What of the colonists who fled Earth in its last days? Might they still be alive on other planets in our solar system?

Roy Bentley and Chris Hartridge set out to learn the truth. And their first stop is Mercury, the planet next door to the sun . . . for wonders await them as they discover Earth's long lost children!