Nightmares, hallucinations, and split personality do not necessarily end in a straitjacket. Sometimes they are the beginning of a career as a galactic observer-agent. It was precisely such an agent on the planet Aivel-5, where a breakthrough into our Universe of a deadly reality from beyond occurred, that Andrei Makeev, an ordinary biologist, had to become — and not of his own free will. War is always terrible. And if your enemy is a transcendent reality capable of taking any shape and using human minds, forcing them to betray friends and kill loved ones, it is twice as terrifying. Andrei Makeev, an agent of the galactic rescue service, had every reason a thousand times over to end his deadly mission on the doomed planet Dosht, but again and again he chooses to stay.