John Alden, former Ivy League football star and now professor of criminal justice, tells a stunned gathering of academics that he is a visitor from the twenty-first century—that he washed up on their campus and in their time after tumbling over a waterfall in the year 2010. He further claims to be a retired New York City homicide detective who went over Ithaca Falls in pursuit of a serial killer. The revelation sets off weeks of trepidation and soul searching in the steep hills and dramatic gorges of Cornell University as the strange visitor tells of the things to come—financial panic, economic depression, a second world war, and most importantly, an attempt to alter the course of history by assassinating Franklin Roosevelt.
