Against his better judgment, Mike Ross is commissioned by the beautiful, wealthy, and eccentric Sara Foster to lead an expedition in search of the legendary Lawrence Knight and his telepathic robot Roscoe. His only guide is the obsequious George Smith, blind from birth, who hears "voices" and whose eyes are represented by the odious pseudo-priest Friar Tuck. Smith's "voices" lead the little expedition to an anonymous planet which welcomes them with a homing beam and then snaps shut around them like a Venus flytrap. Their ship is sealed against them, and they are cast through a quirk of space/ time into a wholly inhospitable desert environment from which it seems there can be no escape.