An embryonic American colony survives in a fertile valley bordered by rugged mountains in a planet dominated by worldwide recurrent tornadoes. Weather scientists have produced powerful frigid and thermal missiles to alter the extreme temperatures generating the storms, and parazopters carry these missiles to the heart of any funnel threatening the colony. The stunningly beautiful country is worth every hazardous moment of existence for the pioneers expanding their liberal, modern New Ventura community. An abundance of indigenous plants and animals have evolved to retreat underground at the first sign of atmospheric turbulence, where they lie dormant until calm skies return and reanimated creatures dig out from beneath the soil and plants break through with tiny shoots to resume living in the sun. It's wonderfully stimulating to the morale to be heroic conquerors of the ecology in a raw new land. An encounter with unsuspected inhabitants not at all dormant beneath their personal territory changes their sense of superiority forever as they learn there's more than one way to be a human being.