Following a series of disasters, the last remnants of humanity are threatened by a fatal disease affecting pregnant women. Kevin Brady, an Irish sailor, travels to Norway and is recruited to work on the Gandreid Project, a plan for some people to escape the ravages of the disease by colonising a distant Earth-like planet, using an interstellar spaceship already in orbit. Kevin begins work under the cloud of being a murder suspect. He meets and falls in love withLaila, a mathematician involved in computing spacecraft orbits, whom he has already helped renunite with her abducted daughter, Freya. Despite acts of sabotage, engineers are launched to prepare the spaceship for the arrival of colonists. One of them is Laila's disgruntled ex-lover, who hatches a scheme to get Laila back. When Kevin returns to Bergen with an unexpected companion, he is appalled to discover that Laila and Freya have left the Earth. Furthermore, their spaceship has unexpectedly re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated.