And then one night Jimmy Starr had been wakened by a terrific crash downstairs in the lower-floor study. He had rushed to the room to find his father stretched out on the floor, blood trickling from a gaping wound in his head. The window was open, showing the way of the assailant's escape. Randall Starr's filing cabinet had been thrown to the floor and battered open with some heavy instrument. Papers lay strewn about in wild disorder. Jimmy knelt at his father's side, in time to hear the old man's last gasping words. "The ... Chronicles ... they took ... the five cyphers. You must get them back, Jimmy, before the last one is completed and the secret discovered. You must, do you understand? The future of all life on this planet depends on it." "Who...?" choked Jimmy. "Tell me who, and I'll...." But the effort had been too great. The old man fell back, his warning unfinished. Clues? Jimmy had employed the finest detectives on Mars in a vain attempt to track down the guilty one. He had followed trails himself, questioned all of his father's former friends and associates. The one and only shred of evidence he had led him no place. This was a polished _falpa_ button which Randall Starr had torn from his assailant's tunic during the struggle--the type of button which members of the limited _superiors_ class effected. The _superiors_ were a throw-back to the feudalistic days of a by-gone age. Powerful overlords with inherited political and financial power, they still wielded a strong influence over an otherwise partially modernized society. So this much Jimmy knew--his father had been murdered and the _Chronicles_ cypher taken by a man who walked in the highest brackets of the System's social worlds. * * * * * In time Jimmy's grief passed, and he began to follow in his father's footsteps. Theoretically, he was acting head of Triplanetary. But with the shipping line operating smoothly with hundreds of efficient under-officials, there was little for him to do. After graduating from the Martian School of Technology, he toured the System in his own space-yacht. It was that trip that brought home to him the poverty and sordid conditions existent in the various worlds. On Venus he had seen powerful land-owners growing fat and rich while native Kamalis and Sarakans toiled in the swamps. On Mars he had toured the luxurious plaisances and estates of the D.O.F.C--the Descendents of the First Colonists--and a hundred miles out in the desert had walked through the stinking narrow streets of the Thedras, the despised aboriginals of the West Plateaus.