Lizzie Lee is a teenage farm girl who grew up on Excenus, a dry planet nearly inhospitable to any life. Her father, a former miner of the planet’s main resource, innovated a new system that allowed him to start a prosperous agricultural sector. For years, he and engineer “Uncle” Charlie raised Lizzie and grew their business, until one day an accident with a harvesting machine gravely injured him.  Medics took him to a hospital in the planet’s main Town, where the miners live, and Lizzie determinedly follows them and insists on staying nearby while her father recovers in the hospital. The nurses direct her to a nearby hotel, but she instead finds a seedy bar in the bad part of town and goes inside looking for a fight. She sees a man injured in a bar brawl and faints, and when she awakens, all the tough men in the bar are set on protecting her. She realizes she fainted because she hasn't eaten in a while, but plays into their innocent perception of her and agrees to work in exchange for housing while her father recovers, and also helps de-escalate fights and calm the bar’s atmosphere. A few days after her father wakes up, a stranger approaches her outside the hospital and introduces himself as a professor from Earth, M’Clare, who observed her natural talent for calming the rowdy bar regulars. He offers to help her escape her well-intentioned protectors without revealing her true identity as a rich farmer’s daughter by pretending to be her uncle and taking her to Earth.  After discussion with her father and Uncle Charlie, they agree to M’Clare’s plan. However, Lizzie realizes there’s more going on than initially appears; once she leaves Excenus, M’Clare and her father intend for her to stay on Earth and attend college. She initially refuses, but at her father’s wishes she agrees to carry out the plan and go to Earth.  On Earth, Lizzie attends a preliminary school for students without a conventional education. She reads at a much slower speed than all the other students, which makes using the reading machine and studying much more difficult for her, but she still manages to pass the exam to attend college. At the college, she meets other Earth students such as B, her new roommate. Again, she finds her grades suffering because of her slow reading ability, but is too ashamed to admit her handicap to M’Clare. One day, she watches his speech on free will and resistance, and then goes into the reading machine to study. The machine overloads and Lizzie freaks out, running to M’Clare. The professor is surprised by her reaction and they revisit the machine, where he realizes that the entire time she’s actually been resisting the reading machine’s function and causing a much slower reading time. When she opened her mind to free will, Lizzie began to read at a faster speed. Now that she knows the reason for her slower reading, she studies much more effectively and manages to pass her final exam. Even though she was initially reluctant to go to school, when she finds out she passed, she’s secretly excited that she gets to stay.