Ray C. Noll 39 min read

Nothing makes people angrier than being told their method won't work, as three jet-copters descending on a dusty farm are about to prove.

Ray C. Noll's 1957 Astounding story opens with a precise, hardware-loving image of aircraft folding rotors and settling in the dust to meet a coveralled man by a pickup, and builds an idea-driven puzzle around human stubbornness in the face of a stubborn problem. Classic problem-solving magazine SF in the Campbell mold. Read it for competent-people-fixing-things fiction with a wry read on human nature.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

39 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

H. R. Van Dongen