Two men awaken from a long cryogenic sleep, to do battle in a future as primitive and violent as the remote past. California has become an arid island wasteland of subsistence farming, hunting and scavenging. The air quality is now perfect unlike the bio-contaminated atmosphere of almost a century before. The population hovers around 20,000 and there is no identifiable form of government. Nothing moves on the surface streets or freeways and the major remaining peoples are Tule Indians surviving alongside small bands of other survivors, as their ancestors did two hundred years earlier. A scientist, Allen Brand, is revived in the future, to repair the damage caused by then U.S. President Campbell, who almost obliterated the planet's population when his satellite dusted the stratosphere with a lethal man-made bacteria. Campbell has a few hours lead on Brand, and frantically attempts a cover-up of his genocidal mistake.