A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket". Yet even then did I know I had been a Star-Rover . . . * He has been imprisoned in San Quentin and subjected to the tortures of the damned for a crime he cannot reveal the details of -- for he knows nothing of it! And now he is sentenced to hang! "The fools!" he rails. "As if they could throttle my immortality with their clumsy device of rope and scaffold! I shall walk, and walk again, oh, countless times, this fair earth! And I shall walk in the flesh -- be prince and peasant, savant and fool, sit in the high place and groan under the wheel!"