One day Dr. Ian Lacklin’s only graduate assistant applied for a special grant in the professor’s name. Next thing Lacklin knew, he was the master of an interstellar spaceship and a quarrelsome crew of four. Their mission – to track down space colonies that had fled the Earth centuries ago, before the Final War. The search should have been an historian’s dream. But Lacklin was an academic wimp who’d never faced anything tougher than a rough exam, the crew could hardly stop fighting long enough to run the mission, and their spacecraft was one of the most unreliable and dangerous ever built. Too bad, because in a few short months the fate of the Earth would be in their hands!