A bank executive walks the cobblestones of colonial Boston, and the past won't let him go. Charles Justin is a man caught between worlds: the comfortable present where he's an executive vice-president, and 18th-century Boston where a charismatic preacher named Henri Dubois is building a movement that could ignite catastrophe. The title asks a dark question: what if the men who enable catastrophe are the ones who seem most sane? Justin must decide whether to fund Dubois's Missionism, a decision that could reshape history or destroy it. His psychiatrist, Jack Fellowes, represents the voice of rational modernity trying to pull him back from the edge. His wife Marie represents everything he stands to lose. Merwin's 1953 novel is a thinking person's thriller, a time-travel story where the temporal mechanics matter less than the moral ones: What if you could see the consequences of your choices before you make them? Would that make you wise, or would it drive you mad? This is existential science fiction dressed in historical costume, concerned with the terrible weight of free will.
