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 "