Synopsis: From the first page of the Ace Double: "The old civilization or the new wilderness? Simon Gamble, Earth's most brilliant scientist, and Vincent Drega, the most successfully aggressive tycoon the world had ever seen, were rivals in the battle for supremacy over man's mind and life. Then Simon plunged the planet into thirty centuries of suspended animation. When it awoke, a billion and a half people were dead, civilization was a primitive rubble, cannibalism stalked the devastated ruins. But awake, too, was the old competition between Gamble and Drega. Gamble struggled to rebuild his world with pure science; Drega relied on human resourcefulness and initiative. The conflict of these two scientific gladiators makes for an unusually thrilling and imaginative creation of worlds we may one day come to know!"