Mike Jerome, a likeable young TV writer, visits Professor Smitt, a physicist, who gives him an idea for a TV script: using some source of light, perhaps a laser beam, one could reduce the human structure to a form that could be transmitted into the future as electrical pulses, and thus create time travel. On the way home Mike is hit by a taxi, and when he recovers he finds the date is 1979, ten years in the future. Thus is the beginning of a series of bewildering, fascinating ten year jumps. Mike is himself living the time change himself! At the end of each stop he tries to find his best friend, Pete Jones, a Negro jazz musician. Mike's lumps to 1989, 1999 and so on, take him into such far-reaching places as London, the Northern Territory of Australia, California and the Italian Alps.