H.G. Wells foresaw the future in such visionary novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. On a night in London in 1946, newspaper reporter Ellen McGillivray arrives at the home of legendary literary figure, Herbert George Wells. Expecting to hear of the events and people who formed his prophetic imagination, she is informed of a world in which known scientific boundaries no longer exist. It begins a half-century earlier at London's Imperial College of Science where Wells meets Jane Robbins, a scientist equally fascinated by unnatural phenomenon, and a woman who immediately captures Wells' heart. Through midnight experiments and secret investigations into the paranormal, through the follies of chance and the miracles of fate, Wells and Robbins find themselves slipping into whirlpools of time, both past and present, they never thought possible. Since this mysterious universe can not be shared with the world, this becomes a wondrous secret that binds them forever. To Wells' surprise, Ellen accepts his outlandish tales of traveling through time. For she is not, she admits, a journalist, but rather an underground government agent who has inherited a puzzling artifact that only Wells could possibly identify: a crystalline orb said to contain the mysteries of the universe, our relationships to other planets, and our past encounters with them. What Ellen is about to discover is that at the heart of the mysterious orb is buried the equally mysterious heart of Jane Robbins, the one who inspired H.G. Wells to tell the amazing truth in the form of science "fiction."