Judge Montgomery, disillusioned with the corrective services available to him to rehabilitate teen-age offenders sets up a remote correctional camp, %u201CLast Chance%u201D, in Arizona financed from his inheritance from his father. The camp is run as in the pioneering days overseen by a young couple Joshua and Bella Oberman. The Judge sentences six young teenagers to the camp who are successfully rehabilitated and go on to a University or a profession secretly financed by the Judge. A miniscule meteor introduces a new crystal into a cement railway abutment; this crystal combines with the cement reproducing itself and destroying the cement. People, animals and insects quickly spread the crystals and wherever the crystals come in contact with cement, concrete or mortar they destroy it replicating themselves.