Enter the Nebula

The mercury clock over the white mantel chimed the hour of eight A.M., and Jimmy Starr sat up in bed yawning. As the last note faded into silence, the door of the room opened, and a white-haired man entered, carrying a tray.

"Good morning, Mr. Starr."

"Good morning, Peters," Jimmy said. "Did you bring the paper?"

The servant nodded, propped a morning edition against Jimmy's upraised knees and placed the breakfast tray on the side of the bed. "Will you have orange juice or Martian melon today?" he asked.

"Orange juice, I believe," replied Jimmy absently, and then coughed to hide the sudden tenseness that had entered his voice. He waited impatiently while the aged servant opened the window blinds and busied himself about the room.

When at last the man had gone, Jimmy sat bolt upright and stared at the screaming type.

NEBULA ON THE LOOSE AGAIN GENTLEMAN BURGLAR PROVES TO BE COMMON CRIMINAL

The running story was bitter in its denunciation. Where before those same columns had accepted each new exploit of the Nebula as a prank upon the police and an irritation to the wealthy, they now demanded legal action. For this time the Nebula had committed murder!

The Crater City Museum had been robbed during the night. Three priceless Thro-Pahl figurines had been stolen. An aged night watchman had been brutally beaten to death.

"The guilt is undeniable," the paper continued. "Drunk with power, this sadist had the effrontery to leave behind one of his mocking cards. What are the police going to do about it?"

Jimmy Starr leaned back and let a soft whistle escape from his lips. The newspaper story was all wrong. For Jimmy Starr had spent the entire night in his apartment. And Jimmy Starr was the Nebula!

He didn't know quite how long he had been playing this dual role. Years now, ever since his father, Randall Starr, president of the Triplanetary Freight Lines had been murdered and had left his enormous fortune to his son.

Randall Starr had come up from poverty with his only heritage, a brilliant mind and skillful hands. He had dabbled in a little of everything before he had become associated with the Venus-Mars-Earth shipping business. But all during his years of executive activity, he had always found time for two things: his hobby, the manufacture and study of theft-proof materials and devices; and the deciphering of the ancient Lost Chronicles of Mars.

It was this last that had resulted in his untimely end. Jimmy Starr had known for a long time that his father was on the verge of a great discovery, but what that discovery was he had had no inkling.

"Wait 'til I've finished," Randall Starr would always say when questioned. "Some day I'll have an announcement to make that will startle all Mars."

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.

Then and there Jimmy Starr had decided to add a twofold purpose to his life. He would do all in his power to aid the oppressed poor, and he would strain every effort to plague the lives of the superiors class. Some day, in some way, that effort would lead him, he felt sure, to his father's murderer and the stolen Chronicles cypher. The only item in question was the time element.

He spent six months in his father's private library, studying everything he could find on locks, time vaults, hermetic chambers and impenetrable walls. Six months more went into a thorough reading on the various subjects of criminology, micro-fingerprints, robot detectors.

He had begun quietly at first, a small art treasure taken from the collection of some greedy superiors millionaire. But gradually the daring of those thefts, the absolute lack of clues, with the exception of the tell-tale blue card, had attracted attention. In a year his fame had spread as far as Pluto. In six months more the Nebula was a byword in every tongue.

The police had sworn action, the press had chuckled, and the public had looked with open admiration on this benefactor of the downtrodden.