Sometimes an unsaid word or an unfinished deed reflects on the future far more tragically than mistakes that were actually made. So, the incomplete operation on Mars to destroy the chronogen led to a dead-end situation in humanity’s development. Just a little more, and Earth’s Regulume will exhaust itself—and thus be destroyed. The culprit of what happened, who by then has become the Commissioner of Equilibrium, Stanislav Panov decides to go back into the past, find a copy of “himself,” and by passing that Stas the necessary knowledge, persuade him to help complete the job. But the mission is complicated by the fact that now too powerful forces are interested in preventing humanity from veering down into the abyss…