Cussick encounters Jones at a carnival – a mutant from the recent war, Jones has the power to see events a year into the future. It is as though he were reliving the future as the past – so he lives in the present, but sees the future as inevitability.  

The world federalist government (fedgov) that grew up in the post-war world implements and polices a regime of total relativism. Any attempt to express objective truth is banned and punishable.  

So when Jones appears and can predict the future with complete accuracy, he presents a threat and a problem for fedgov. 

He realises at a certain point (when he is picked up by a travelling salesman as a young man) that his ability in fact gives him great power. He becomes mixed in with the future – not passively living it but actively shaping it. 

In parallel to the Jones story runs another about a colony of mutants (deliberately created this time), who live in a dome simulation of the Venusian environment. They are being bred as colonists, although they do not know this. 

Jones comes to power as he is able to articulate the threat coming from some large single-cell organisms floating in from outer space. The exact nature of the threat is just beyond the horizon of his vision, so he has to guess, but he is able to use them to whip up the public and overturn fedgov. 

Just before he comes to power, the scientists in charge of the Venusian project send the 8 colonists to Venus (worried that the whole thing will fail under the new regime). 

It turns out that the organisms are relatively harmless reproductive cells for interstellar beings, just using the earth and the solar system as a place to procreate. They however seal off the human race in a relatively small patch of space and close down any dreams of colonising in extended space. 

Jones’s war against the beings ends in failure (something he realises in advance as he knows the future). He bet wrong on the beings. He also knows that as the world begins to understand that he betrayed them, they will turn on him. His only way out is to be killed before the world realises what has happened. Then it will look like it was not his fault, and the cult of Jones will thrive. So he orchestrates his own death – something he knew he would do since the last year has been spent in a strange limbo. Unable to see the future, he is just aware of a trace of his life as it is extinguished. 

Cussick and his wife Nina escape the world Jones has made. Cussick was the one who killed Jones, so there is no place for him. They go to Venus to live in a dome with the colonists (who have begun adapting to life on the planet, reproducing biologically and building infrastructure).