The plot concerns an old man who claims to have travelled back in time from a future in which
Earth has lost a devastating war to its own
Martian and
Venusian colonies. The man turns out to be a synthetic human, designed to trick the Earth people into believing they could never win the war, forcing them to make peace. This type of android is a forerunner of the type appearing in Dick's novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its
film adaptation. A similar, supposedly time-displaced "war veteran" character appears in Dick's novel
The Zap Gun. ==References==