There is a problem with life. It's ending. All of it. Everywhere. The sort of people who know about these things think, on balance, that something should be done about it. The good news is that the head of planet Arcadia's Zooming Division, General Buck, has a plan. The bad news is he hasn't really thought it through. When Professor Doubt Zooms a morally-inclined burglar, Scratch, from the English town of Southend-on-Sea to Arcadia in the Promantary Nebula he is more surprised than his subject to discover three more life forms have made the journey from Earth with him. One of them is Mr. Raisbeck, a stuffy middle-class Englishman who seems more concerned about missing the delivery slot for his new sofa than his trip through space and time. He and Scratch must single-handedly save all life in the universe with nothing more than their bewildered confusion and a copy of the best-selling book of the third millennium, Lady Bumpkins And The Case Of The Knotted Artichoke.