Doctor Andrew Thompson is a young black astrophysicist from the future who builds a time machine and uses it to go back to 1888. He meets a girl who went to the school where he teaches, and he falls in love with her. He goes back and forth to see her and it soon gets him in trouble with his department chairman and a strange man in black, who turns out to be a ‘Watcher.’ Andrew now must keep his secret and keep from being exiled in time.