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An analytic thinker with a head for numbers, Marcus Pendleton has just been released from a London prison, where he was serving time for embezzlement. In considering what to do to survive on the outside world, he, reminded that it was a computer that caught his criminal activities and that computers may be the end of the embezzlement business, decides to join the game by using computers in his next embezzlement scheme. Knowing that the person will be out of the country indefinitely and learning just enough about the computer in question from said person, Marcus assumes the identity of computer expert Caesar Smith to get a job as a computer program designer at the London regional office of the multinational Ta-Can-Co (Tacoma Concrete + Cement Corporation), its computer, holding information on all the company's accounts, which he plans to use to funnel moneys into his own pocket. Three issues arise that place wrenches into his plan. First, the executive vice present Carlton J. Klemper has had installed a fail safe on the computer, the M505, to protect it from embezzlers, the fail safe's literal little blue light that may be bane of Marcus' existence. Second, officious vice president of data processing, Willard C. Gnatpole, is a naturally suspicion person who doesn't seem to trust "Caesar". And third, scatterbrained Patty Terwilliger, a new neighbor in his apartment building who in her ineptitude can't seem to hold a job, infiltrates both Marcus' personal and professional lives.