The story is told in the first person by a convict of San Quentin Prison (professor of agricultural science Standing Darrell) who had been sentenced to death penalty. For a long time Darrell had been in an individual cell where he had been tortured by so called “jacket”, a canvas cloth in which the whole body can be tightly laced, inducing angina.

Looking for a method to mitigate the torture, Standing tries “the short death” (a kind of trance state) about which he found out from another prisoner while communicating by tapping. As a result, he travels among the stars and then experiences a lot of episodes of his past lives. The main part of the book contains the descriptions of the journeys to his old lives.