and finds incriminating evidence. The next day, at a meeting with Silvers, Makian, Hennes and Benson, Starr again appears as the masked Space Ranger. He reveals that it was Benson who poisoned the food while pretending to take samples of it, while Hennes was his accomplice in contact with criminal syndicates in the Asteroid Belt; the distraught Benson confesses. Afterward, Bigman confides to Starr that despite the disguise, he recognized him by his black-and-white boots, too plain for any Martian. Themes As John H. Jenkins has noted, Asimov's novels typically are set either on Earth (Pebble in the Sky, The End of Eternity, The Caves of Steel), or on fictional extrasolar planets (The Currents of Space, The Naked Sun, the Foundation series). The major exceptions are the Lucky Starr novels, which take place among the familiar worlds of the Solar System. David Starr: Space Ranger is the only Asimov novel set on Mars, and the picture of Mars that he draws is accurate, if optimistic, based on what was known in 1951. Asimov's Martian atmosphere is one-fifth as dense as Earth's and lacks oxygen. He does not mention the famous Martian canals, though the novel's fissures might allude to these. David Starr's character is unabashedly based on the Western hero the Lone Ranger, including the mask and the habit of disappearing after defeating the criminal villains. Asimov goes to great lengths to recreate the fictional American West: the Martian farm boys are tough, rugged individualists like the fictional cowboys. In subsequent books, Starr moves away from being a masked crime-fighter, and becomes a Cold War secret agent, defending the Solar System from authoritarian enemies. The Council of Science is explained more fully in the later novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus: In these days, when science really permeated all human society and culture, scientists could no longer restrict themselves to their laboratories. It was for that reason that the Council of Science had been born. Originally it was intended only as an advisory body to help the government on matters of galactic importance, where only trained scientists could have sufficient information to make intelligent decisions. More and more it had become a crime-fighting agency, a counterespionage system. Into its own hands it was drawing more and more of the threads of government.Asimov had seen the invention of nuclear energy escape the control of scientists and become the plaything