Liz has been sent down to Earth by her parents to study cultural engineering at Russett College with her friend B. They wait for their final exams in school to be graded, after which is Liz is to return to her home on Excensus 23. While they wait, they stay on an island in the Pacific. Liz goes out to the water one night, and is covered by a large plastic object. When she awakens, she is in a ship with B and a pilot, Ram Gopal, who graduated from their school the year before. B and Ram have decided they all need to leave the island before anyone notices. Peter, another former classmate, pushes Liz into a room by herself, which has a reading machine which she believes she needs to use for a second part of her final exam. She is given a problem in which two groups have separately settled the planet Incognito, and upon finding the other group there, are on the brink of war. Liz is tasked to come up with a solution to solve the conflict, which she does. The next morning, Liz is asked whether or not she would be able to implement her solution to the problem if it were real. She responds that she would. The day after, an announcement comes over the loudspeaker that some of the rest of the class has also taken the test, and the ones that responded that they would not be willing to implement their solutions were brought back to Earth. She is again asked to rethink if she would could to implement her solution, and again says that she would. Liz’s professor, M’Clare, comes to her and says that she must leave, as her dad is on his way to visit her on Earth before their ship gets back. M’Clare only wants students whose families will not miss them from Earth to partake in the mission, so Liz would no longer fit. Still, she refuses to leave, and insists that she will stay for the mission. The students are brought together to work on a joint solution, supervised by Ram and Peter, alongside Colonel Delano-Smith. The theoretical problem they had was in fact real, and they are meant to fix it. They plan to get an old spaceship, _Gilgamesh, _and leave it at the sight of the planet Incognito to make it appear as if it crashed while trying to land. They believe the people on Incognito will try to find the people of _Gilgamesh, _and that will divert their attention from potential conflict. They create a fake background for the people of Gilgamesh. M’Clare goes to retrieve the ship; he seems to fail, and Liz follows him to do it herself. She does so successfully, but is seen by someone on Incognito. She blacks out, and comes to in a hospital where both she and M’Clare are being treated. Their mission was successful, and M’Clare tells her that she passed her exams. He then proposes to her, and she accepts.