Having taken advanced classes in Marxism and socialist dogma, and having lived it, lifelong friends Barten Colby and Joel Wilbur are well-versed in the subject. Even so, they differ markedly in their fundamental beliefs.

Bart, a rising star, is a staunch socialist tending toward communism while Joel, still harboring serious doubts, guards his thoughts carefully. Both were midlevel managers in the socialist government until Bart was unexpectedly elevated to level two, only one step removed from the oligarchs who rule satellite America.

Joel replaced him as manager of the global life and environmental glorification project. Their close relationship is strained, however, when Joel lets slip a word, endangering both of them, while at the same time bringing him to the attention of a covert group intent on overthrowing the socialist regime in America.

Joining that group, Joel soon finds himself tasked to surveil region nine to determine if there is any support there for the group's activities since the people's support is essential, and there are far more people in that hellish slum region than in all the other regions in America combined. This puts Joel in the precarious position of working for the regime while, at the same time, working to destroy it, all the while under close twenty-four-hour surveillance.

One more slip could be lethal. But his efforts are rewarded when he not only falls in love with Celia Noel, the woman who enticed him to join the group, but is taken in by a struggling family and is befriended by two Christian ministers, laboring under threat of death, and an American expatriate who is trying to raise a clandestine army in region nine.

Bart continues to make his mark as he meets and falls in love with Sara Comely, a classmate from his youth, and rises to the top of the International Socialist Democracy. .