What happens when the future invades the present? Tom was only 13 years old when he vanished without a trace, so it is not surprising that the stranger who shows up 36 years later claiming to be Tom is thought to be an imposter. But what if he is the boy grown to be a young man, returned not from the past but from the future-a future with faster-than-light spacecraft, death-dealing ray guns, humanoid robots, menacing aliens, bug-eyed monsters, heroic spacemen, captivating spacewomen, megalomaniacal madmen, sentient dinosaurs, and bioengineered cats? If Tom is telling the truth, an interstellar conflict whose origin lies centuries in the future has spilled over into the present-and the past, present, and future are entwined in a riddle for which there appears to be no answer. The Solar Patrol is a blend of space opera and hard science fiction set in the past as it never was and the future as it used to be.