Steiner, we learn, is the father of an autistic child named Manfred, who is presently being housed in a camp for "anomalous children." Manfred's autism, his therapist believes, is the result of the child's both living and perceiving outside the mainstream of time. The boy sees his own future on a Mars where all the grand colonizing schemes have fallen to decay and entropy, though he is unable to communicate this vision to anyone around him.

Manfred's abilities attract the attention of Arnie Kott, head of the all-powerful Water Workers Local, who wishes to tap into the child's ability to foresee the future. He enlists Jack's aid in a dubious scheme to build a device that allow Manfred to "share his perceptions" with others around him. Before long, several colonists are experiencing Manfred's time-skewed sense -- going through the same events repeatedly -- and Jack feels his old schizophrenic paranoia once more manifesting itself. When Artie takes the autistic boy to Dirty Knobby, a rock held sacred by the aboriginal Bleekmen native to Mars, time and reality grow even more confused.

Kott is the novel's great villain: the first time we see him, he's in a steam bath pointedly designed to waste water on the desert planet. Acquisitive, capricious and incapable of seeing beyond his own short-term gain, he represents colonial capitalism at its most avaricious. (That he's the Supreme Goodmember of a plumber's union is an irony that probably played more strongly in the early sixties.) He pushes Jack to complete his project, even as he knows that doing so will most likely drive the repairman into a full mental breakdown. We wait for this greedy s.o.b. to get his comeuppance, and he thankfully does.

On the sidelines, striving to get a piece of the action, are psychiatrist Milton Glaub and Kott's sexy mistress Doreen Anderton. With Glaub, you can perhaps see Dick getting his writer's revenge after years of doubtless listening to insincere empathy and psychobabble. The shrink proves an inept social player who rationalizes his own failings by diagnostically blaming everyone around him. In one of the writer's typically inspired bits of social commentary, we learn that one of the jobs of the future psychotherapist is to attend social functions and stand in for phobic patients: "instead of curing the patient of his phobias, one became in the manner of a lawyer the man's actual advocate in the man's place..." The goal, then, isn't curing the patient but making it socially convenient for them to maintain their mental illness.

Doreen, while beholden to Artie, remains a surprisingly sympathetic figure. As a novelist, Dick was perhaps at his weakest working with female characters, who frequently come across as bourgeois, petulant and unsatisfied. (Which may partially explain the man's multiple marriages.) But Doreen proves to have a stronger sense of empathy for Jack than does the professional empathizer Glaub - and is the subject of a particularly disturbing time-slip vision from Manfred, besides.