Author Mitch Alexander arrives on the farming colony planet Temarand, where his brother has become the colony's formost carpenter, and his sister-in-law famous for her quality apple orchards. Alexander is seeking a good story idea, but is unaware that his arrival has triggered a backlash on the Spacer worlds's most radical groups. Seeing Earth as a disease-ridden, over-populated, dying planet with little to offer the galaxy, these people have decided to make Alexander their example.

A few days after Alexander goes missing, a severely wounded man is discovered on the grounds of Temarand's only convent/orphanage. The man has suffered a severe skull facture and a major concussion, affecting his memory and the speech center of his brain. It takes months of care for him to regain enough of his facalties to inform the nuns that he's indeed the missing writer and what little he remembers of the attack.

Those responsible are arrested and sent into perminent exile on Earth, where they will die from the diseases they no longer have immunity to. Meanwhile, Alexander's recovery is slow, though he falls in love with the young nun who found and has devoted her time to nursing him back to health. When he's healthy enough to return to Earth, the entire membership of the convent accompanies him, the Pope having decided that the Spacer worlds are too dangerous for any Earth-based religious order.

This is intended as a sort of prequel to Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, chronicaling the first steps of the Earthman's isolation and building of the Cites.