Imagine a future where centuries of wars, economic disasters, disease and ecological devastation have left a small percentage of humanity alive and where vast swaths have been taken out of animal life. It's a world where none of the nations we know have survived intact, where much of civilization has barely returned to a feudal state and where a few nations control the surviving technology. A group of scientists and technocrats from the Republic of Nevada have finally succeeded in developing a time machine that will let them send teams into the past to gather specimens of birds and animals that have been lost, and to collect as much as possible of the information and culture that was lost when civilization broke down. Nothing ever goes quite as planned, and the Recovery team has to deal with animal attacks, arrests, assaults, high-speed pursuits, romantic entanglement between a team member and a 20th-Century man, as well as the problems caused when a traitor tries to sabotage the entire project.
