A strange abberation occurs in the medical community 75 miles southwest of Chicago, in the spring of the year. A patient enters an ER in a panic state. He is given psycho-active drugs to calm him, but they seem to have little effect on the terror that is growing within him. Finally the doctors have to put him in a coma to prevent him from running in fright. When they try to wake him from the coma a day later, his condition has worsened. He is assigned to a mental hospital, and sedated to the point of near unconsciousness.

Opening scene, we hear a male voice making motor noises as our view pans across a farm scene. Finally we focus on a man in blue jeans sitting under a tree and playing with a toy tractor. A woman approaches from behind him, and watches, and then says, "Second childhood, Phil?" He looks up at her, and asks, "Jane, where is my frog?" "Frog," she asks? "What frog?" "My frog! You know, green, red tongue, long legs, jumps. The one I play with all the time." Jane laughs. "OK, Phil. Your funny." Demanding: "Well, where is it?" Playing along, mockingly: "Why, I haven't seen it, Phil. Maybe it jumped away." Angry: "Where is my frog? What have you done with it?" Phil stands menacingly. Jane steps backs, confused. He comes toward her. She moves slowly backward, and then begins moving toward the house. He continues to approach. Jane moves more quicly, and this escalates into a chase. "Give me my frog, Jane, or I won't have sex with you anymore."

Three days later, a similar case enters the same ER. Immediately the attending physician requests local psychiatrists to monitor the man. They make treatment suggestions, but watch hopelessly as the man follows the same trek of symptoms as the previous man. No one has a clue what to do, or what is causing this. Over the next thirty days, the number of hospitalizations increase exponentially.

A number of specialists are called in to find the problem. Demographic data isolates the area to a ten by ten mile section of rural Illinois, but within five miles of Springfield, the Illinois capital. Analysis of the demographic data suggests that the problem is spreading toward the capital. The CDC is called in to help find the cause, the cure, and prevent an epidemic.

The hospital, at first, attempted to keep the problem quiet, but now medical professionals realize that they need to see the affected people earlier, much earlier, so they can identify the symptoms earlier to learn more about the cause. They issue a press release to the local news media.

The news media is at first helpful, but soon rumors are flying about coverups and rampant disease spreading across the nation. Panic ensues, with ERs flooded with people who think they have the disease. Theories and speculation abound, with every conspiracy theorist citing UFOs, secret military experiments gone haywire, a mad scientist "bending genetic code" at the local medical university research lab... on corn, a new disease, and panic induced hysteria over something that doesn't really exist.

As people come in earlier who are actually affected, the doctors are able to interview them to discover what is going on symptomatically, but not the cause. Sadly the problem follows the same course. But they learn from interviews that the victims lose their sense of time. They begin doing MRIs of their brains, but find that the basal ganglia and the right parietal cortex, which are involved in short term sense of time, seem to be healthy; and through motor skill tests for judging time, these areas are judged to be functioning properly.

Further interviews indicate that in the earlier stages of the disease, people seem to be living the past. Additional testing indicates that it isn't that they are in the past, they don't seem to be able to distinguish between the past and the present. As the condition progresses, it is if all of the past is right now. Whatever happened in the past has just happened to the person. Some are in trauma because of past events that seem to have just happened. Some hate the past. But some seem to use this as an opportunity to integrate past experiences and grow from them.

Knowing this warpage of time, or loss of a sense of time, is going on, the researchers discover the final blow. To each of these affected people, there is no sense of a future. This is thought to be the crushing blow that sends these people into a panic that requires heavy sedation.

Hearing this on the news, local hypnotherapist Joshua has had experience with just such a phenomenon, having given post-hypnotic suggestions experimentally to people suggesting that they are unable to conceive of a future. He realizes that the doctors looking at the condition have jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Joshua offers his services, but when the emminently qualified physicians review his credentials, he is simply told that his services aren't required, but they will "keep him in mind." A local newspaper reporter hears the outcome and publicizes it. Joshua becomes a local celebrity by speaking to the press on the subject, but he is still dismissed by many.

In the meantime, the problem has reached a Springfield suburb, and is moving quickly through it. The area, and all territory within a mile of it, are quarantined. The CDC has brought in every specialist and every person who is field trained, including military specialists, to help in the search for the problem. They don't yet know what is causing the problem, whether a microbe, a toxin, a bacteria, a virus, a mutant macrophage that escaped some laboratory, pollution... the possible causes seem endless. Without knowing the cause, they have no idea how the problem is spread, and interviews have been little help except to watch as the problem gains territory. Hardly any abnormalities are showing up in patient blood tests.

So far there has been no spread of the condition through contact with individuals. But the CDC feels the situation is so unknown and critical that people should not count on contact as being OK. The CDC refuses to issue any comments, announcements, or press releases indicating that public contact is safe.

The public is beginning to panic for real. People are beginning to leave Springfield, and they are meeting resistance from other communities who don't want to take a chance that they are carrying the cause with them. If it gets to Chicago, third largest US city with continuous international travellers, the problem will quickly become a pandemic - the entire world will be at risk. In a move rarely seen, Chicago's Mayor declares a travel ban to the Springfield area. He coerces the Illinois State Governor into mobilizing the National Guard to enforce the travel ban. A fifty mile perimeter is established around Springfield, with only essential personnel and humanitarian products allowed in. No one goes out. Enter with the expectation that you may die in Springfield.

Springfield becomes sharply divided. Various groups begin marching and rioting. One group of fanatics try to burn the hospital before the overburdened police bring them under control. This hampers medical efforts, and research on the problem has to be moved to safer quarters within the hospital. All researchers, and doctors are restricted to a small subset of rooms on the basement level, and ER patients with any symptoms are immediately quarantined, and if symptoms continue to develop they are sent to this area. The hospital itself has become a holding area for these patients, and all other patients and services have been transferred to other facilities.

Scientists test fertilizers, insecticides, and weed killers that farmers are spraying for their crops. Soil samples are taken looking for unusual chemicals or toxins. Mold and spores are sampled from environmental surfaces, ground areas, buildings, ventilation systems, and the air. Food supplies are tested. Ground water is tested. Imported food from different areas and nations are tested for banned or new insecticide residue. New beverages, including alcohols, are tested for any poisons. Bit by bit, every aspect of the environment is tested, and scientists continue coming up empty. The problem marches deeper into springfield. It is as if the ground itself is going bad.

Several of the field personnel who have trod the "bad soil" have come down with the condition. Local volunteers from the medical college volunteer to take their place, taking samples from the environment for testing. While being recruited by one of the CDC professionals, one of their fellow physicians in training says, "Volunteering to die." "Throwing away your future," comments another. Another asks, "Doesn't it make you crazy, wasting all of your life and training to have no future?" The volunteers shrug, but one comments, "No, it bothers me, but... it doesn't make me crazy."

The CDC professional is struck by the comment. He remembers Joshua's comments that they are jumping to the wrong conclusion - the lack of a future is not the problem that drives them into a panic. He invites Joshua to join the team.

Joshua begins interviewing new patients, particulary when they get to the point that they lose a sense of the future. He learns that their concept of time is gone. He can talk to them about past experiences, but although they can talk about events, their sense of them being placed in time is gone.

As the patient progresses, he tries to understand what they understand about the future. The future is an abstract concept, an extension of time, from past, to present, into the future. Without a sense of time, they are unable to understand future as a concept. He can say words like "tomorrow, in the future, next week, in a few minutes," and they hear the familiar words, but they lose the concept of a place in time. They quickly get to the point that if he says they will go into isolation later, to them he means right now.

Joshua begins some linear logic tests with the patients. He finds that they can talk about a string of events. The words, "and then" make sense to them to establish a sequence of events. But the words "and then" are conjunctives that make sense of one thing that has to happen before another, but they don't relate to time to the people. If you talk about the events out of sequence to them, they are separate events but right now in time. It is as if the sequence, I have to learn chemistry and then microbiology, becomes "I am learning chemistry and microbiology." Joshua consults a Sanskrit scholar to try to see if he can shed any light on this idiomatic way of speaking.

Even though they can recognize that they are in different stages of their lives during those experiences, that is, they dress differently, they are larger or smaller, their parents and friends are young or have aged, they still fail to be able to place anything in time. It is as if any experience called to mind has just happened. He begins to have some control through hypnotherapy techniques that get them to focus on one specific thing and exclude all other thoughts from their mind.

They find: an old tree disease is sweeping through the area. They have seen it on the leaves, tested it, and it is innocuous enough, although maybe a mutated variety. The worms eat the leaves. They have tested the worms, which appear to die earlier than normal - nothing. The disease toxins (residue) combine with an enzyme in the worm's digestive system, and a new product is excreted. This new product dries to a white powder which quickly turns to dust and is blown into the area, getting into the lungs, where it is put into the blood system. It is like a psychodelic drug. Minute amounts, which mimic other natural enzymes on the chemical analysis, are highly toxic.

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