Somewhere outside of time as we understand it is the timeless realm known as Eternity, where a group of highly trained technicians – drawn from all the Centuries under their control – have manipulated the Earth’s history to transform it into what they believe to be a perfect world, free from every disaster and hardship. But when Senior Computer Twissel sends a young Technician named Harlan to study the 480th Century in the company of a seductive woman, Harlan begins to suspect that Twissel may have some secret plan of his own which has something to do with the forbidden centuries before time travel was invented...

This drama about a boorish non-conformist takes place in Hungary after the war and is dulled a little by political overtones but is still an engaging story. The setting is the countryside, where an independent, landowning farmer busies himself in his free time by bedding down the women on his farm and then tossing them aside. One such ill-treated lass ends up marrying a young man who is in charge of a communal farm, a farm the womanizing "beast" of the title is later forced to join. The arrogant, formerly independent farmer does not reform his ways and is soon chasing after the young manager's wife, the woman he dropped not that long ago. The results are disastrous.