Tom, a historian, and his girlfriend Sharon, a theoretical physicist, become interested in the story of a small German town that disappeared in the fourteenth century and was never resettled. What they discover is that the village was the site of an interstellar space ship crash 600 years ago.

"When her husband's car is found abandoned and on fire-in the middle of a rainstorm-police suspect that Eve Roth had something to do with it. After all, her husband was suspended from the University of Iowa for inappropriate conduct with a student, and who else but an atmospheric physicist could incinerate a car in a downpour? But Eve has no idea why her husband disappeared. She's desperate to find him, both for herself and her beloved, disabled father-in-law....