Mrs. Berthelson is the only human that can travel through time. The elderly shop owner, whose home is 1965 Northern California, can see the “ahead” — infinite dimensions and possibilities for reality. Every weekend she loads up her rusty old pick-up truck with physics textbooks, screws, food, and machinery before she heads off through time to a dystopian future. Her grandson, Jackie, stows away in the pickup bed, but when she starts to time travel, the truck disappears under him, and Jackie falls out onto the ground of 1965; only Mrs. Berthelson can time travel. She arrives with the goods in a future where Earth has all but turned to ash. On Earth, humans repair a spaceship stolen from what used to be the US military. Their goal: to leave the increasingly inhospitable Earth and colonize Venus. One colonizer, Tellman, hates the other colonists, as he thinks the old world social hierarchy has been flattened by the environment’s destruction. He looks forward to its reinstitution on Venus. Normally, Mrs. Berthelson can charge inflated prices for her goods. The colonists need the supplies and have nowhere else to get them. However, when she arrives, the colonists are just about to take off for Venus. They laugh that this is the last time Mrs. Berthelson can extort them. Mrs. Berthelson gives them the products and drives back in time, furious to have lost business. Mrs. Berthelson uses her power to look to the “ahead” through all the infinite dimensional possibilities. She follows each plotline until she finds the one in which the colonists’ take off fails. Just as they crash back down into Earth, Mrs. Berthelson arrives with her hiked up goods. They can’t get away from her, from the old order.