For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based around each mental illness. Back on earth, Chuck Rittersdorf, a CIA robot programmer, has decided to murder his wife by remote control. He enlists help from a wide range of sources, including a police woman and a telepathic Ganymedean. But when he finds himself in the middle of an interplanetary spy ring on an Alphane moon, his personal revenge plans start to fall apart.