The year is 1950 in a parallel universe. Because the British Navy sailed (rather than remained at anchor) out of Spithead Roadstead on a crucial morning in July 1914, both World War I and II never happened. But ever since, Europe, Asia, and the US have teetered on the brink of conflict. Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, sends a Washington desk man, an agent posing as an archaeological writer, to England to uncover what the Germans (and the Japanese, the Austro-Hungarians, and the Russians) are planning. Thus begins this speculative tale of spies and adventure and chase - into the British Museum, the Minoan palaces on Crete, and climaxing in a mad pursuit through the streets of Geneva. How different is the world for having been at "peace"? Can an idea man and his beautiful assistant ferret out a dread secret weapon and prevent a world conflagration? SPITHEAD occurs in a parallel world of that's slightly out of focus: Reo is a major car manufacturer; Robert A. Taft is president; FDR is the Secretary of the Navy; the B-17 bomber is just into production; TV sets have only come onto the market months before; a Basque republic is newly formed on the Iberian peninsula; Austria-Hungary is a tottering empire propped up by the German kaiser; Trotsky has been in power since the Russian revolution of 1922; Italian fascism, created by a worldwide depression in 1922, is weakly led by its second dictator, Ciano; and a German splinter fascist group, the Koda, is based in Munich and led by Franz Brockdorff. Only the Japanese Empire has shown a similar historical evolution to the one in our universe.