A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.
Pirx, an experienced pilot, is hired to go on a top-secret mission to evaluate some 'nonlinears' (an experimental model of android) for use as crewmembers on future space flights. Pirx and this intriguing crew are sent out to launch two satellites into the rings of Saturn, but he is determined to find out and identify a hostile unhuman coworker among them.
A boy escapes from a reformatory, but comes again into conflict with the law. During a robbery he hits a woman with a bottle on the head. He is convinced he killed her and because of his past thinks that nothing matters anymore. Only when he finds out that the victim did not die, he reveals the truth about what happened.
