Police Detective Skopo Kitanin wages a difficult conflict against the Readers, a vengeance-seeking group of vandals attacking the viroid communications of the planet Farmer.

In the city of Kalender, Skopo joins with the librarian Dari Totmax and her brother, Mlem. The trio traces the vandals through a carnivore anti-vegetarian restaurant, a hydrotherapy hospital, and a viroid language school to two brothers, Prado and Zado Atat, trying to avenge their grandfather, who claimed to have invented viroid memory ribbons. They are traced to a poet's colony on the yellow-snow mountain where the Readers operate from a cave. Skopo follows them to the drama filming industry on the sea coast and a theater on Eerie Island where viroid masks are being used. He captures the last of these brothers on local boats making raids on viroid studies where movies are produced.