When the small boy Torby, a victim of space slave traders, ends up in a slave market, no one can imagine that the old crippled beggar who buys Torby for next to nothing will open a road to the stars for him. The little slave who began his conscious life in the slums of Jubbulpur, the capital of the Nine Worlds, will grow into a conqueror of space, a member of the powerful clan of Free Traders—and ahead of him lies a life full of incredible adventures in a world both splendid and terrifying, created by Robert Heinlein’s inexhaustible imagination.