Then in his twenty-fifth year, he had seen the foulness of the system that broke the lives and courage of the inhabitated worlds. He had seen his father blasted to death for daring to raise his voice against the tyranny of the Food Administrators. He had seen his older brother die while fighting to save their father. And a conflict had raged within him for days; he had fought against the training that had been instilled within him from the day of his birth. From musty records, he had reread the histories of the worlds, had really _understood_ for the first time the true meaning of freedom. And in that hour, he had thrown aside all that had been his life, and had striven to build a new one. In a stolen Kent-Horter, he had prowled the spaceways, striking at small freighters for supplies and wealth. In the cold of space, he had stooped like the Falcon for whom he had been named, and stolen the Food Administrators' supplies time and again. And as ever when a leader arises, other men and women came to him as filings are attracted to a lodestone. Some were renegades, the scum of the spacelanes, whose only desire was to pillage and rob those who could not fight back. But others were the peoples of a dozen worlds in whose minds flowed the desire for freedom, whose only wish was to aid in a seemingly-hopeless fight against the oppressors. And still others were the great minds of science and art and living whose lives had been stifled by rigid rules of living imposed by the Food Administrators. Plan after plan had been made and discarded, until one was left that showed the clever brilliance of its creators. Unlimited wealth was the one thing needed for a revolution, and the plan showed clearly that way in which it could be obtained. Because they controlled all energy-tablet and vitamin factories, the Food Administrators held a whip hand over all the worlds. Starvation was the answer to any trouble that might arise. And should the trouble become too large to handle with the starvation threat, then the degenerate remnants of the famous Interplanetary Patrol used their weapons and brutal methods to enforce the laws. The plan reasoned out by Curt Varga and his board of strategy had been clever enough to avoid all obstacles. In a great asteroid, used by the Falcon for his first base, great rooms had been hollowed by gargantuan dis-guns. These rooms had been converted into living quarters for the men and women. Once established there, the men and women had worked for two years to hollow out more caverns for the growing of fruit and vegetables by hydropony. Still more rooms were manufactured for the workshops and hangars for the fitting of a huge space fleet with which the Falcon hoped to smash for all time the IP and the three men who controlled it.