Who murdered the chief engineer of the RUR robotics company of Portland, Oregon, and stole his prototype computer chip? By 2084 atmospheric temperature is up by eight degrees and ocean levels are up by eighteen feet. Both federal and state governments have collapsed, replaced instead by a system of city-states. Carlton Smith, sales manager of RUR, is tasked with finding out who-done-it and saving the company from bankruptcy. Carlton is a widower with an eighteen year old daughter named Tori. The company provides Carlton with several high tech bugging devices, as well as a custom built vehicle modeled after the old army Humvee. The investigation would lead Carlton and Tori on a dangerous trip through the Wild West back to the ruins of Chicago, which is a Christian Fundamentalist city-state at war with the Black Muslim city-state of Detroit. In Chicago Carlton is kidnapped by Yakuza gangsters and taken to the Roman Catholic city-state of San Antonio, where Tori rescues her father in spectacular fashion. Carlton and Tori travel across the desert toward Los Angeles. But near the ruins of Las Vegas, Tori is kidnapped from the ladies' room of a restaurant. There are no police between Albuquerque and Los Angeles so Carlton continues his trip and reports the crime. He drops into a bar, where he is picked up by a beautiful hostess named Julia O'Brian. Julia works for a politically powerful New Age preacher named the Prophet, whose church is in a political tug-of-war with the American Catholic Church over control of the city. The key to the Prophet's popularity is the fact that he seems to be eternally youthful. How does he do it? What happened to Tori? Will Carlton save the company? Will civilization survive? Read the book to find out!