Tom Godwin 1 hr 2 min read

An officer of a galaxy-spanning service faces a mission where duty runs by no straight path, where loyalty, deception, and the hardest of choices twist the line of duty into something devious indeed.

Tom Godwin's 1962 story is a taut social-SF space opera. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story by the author of the famous 'The Cold Equations', a tense tale of service, obligation, and moral complexity among the stars, where doing one's duty proves anything but simple, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the crooked paths of loyalty and command.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

1 hr 2 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

George Schelling