Jack Brandigan is a graduate architect, a private pilot, and divorced. He lives in the modern world, but is enamored with the past, particularly the Civil War era. Instead of pursuing a profession he trained for, but finds unfulfilling, he turns to searching out old historical documents and photographs for his own literary projects or for those of other writers. His quiet and orderly life is disrupted when he begins having vivid dreams unlike any that he had experienced before and that are seared into his mind. Then his best friend, an African American physicist, while working on a research grant for super-conducting materials, stumbles on a discovery that could disrupt the known world. These two events start a series of expeditions across time that changes Jack's life forever. Jack is no hero, yet as he begins this new tortuous phase of his life, he faces life threatening challenges in two worlds that test whatever courage he does possess.