Time travel with a genuine Motown twist.It is 1969 in the decaying Motor City, Detroit, Michigan. Four people, all students, and friends since attending Cass Technical High School together, all having read fantastic children's stories written by Tom Tolliver, about magic rings, time travel, and such, which was a sort of glue strengthening the bonds between them. Dorothy Hamilton, a nursing student, has created a personal crisis, just before the tale opens, by sleeping with someone other than her boyfriend Pat LaFontaine, a black engineering student. Pete Dinwoody, a full-time self-declared Renaissance genius poet, and part-time English major, is trying to get them back on track, with the help of his girlfriend Annie Kowalski, an art major.At the peak of their emotional argument, there is a loud thunderclap kind of noise, a bright flash of light, and a man wrapped in a strange uniform of weirdly burning plastic appears on the porch of an abandoned house next to them."Where is Tolliver?" he asks. "No hospitals, no doctors," he tells them, and passes out.This is how they meet Patrick Peshkin of the Time Patrol, who comes from a world where Tom Tolliver changed everything, and built a better future.