One moment Joseph Schwartz is a happily retired tailor in 1949 Chicago. The next
he's a helpless stranger on Earth during the heyday of the first Galactic Empir
e. Earth, he soon learns, is a backwater, just a pebble in the sky, despised by
all the other 200 million planets of the Empire because its people dare to claim
it's the original home of man. And Earth is poor, with great areas of radioacti
vity ruining much of its soil--so poor that everyone is sentenced to death at th
e age of sixty.
Joseph Schwartz is sixty-two.
