David Evans Al Landau 26 min read

A flight surgeon paces his quarters, haunted by what happened to a test subject during that afternoon's experiment.

David Evans and Al Landau's 1963 story opens on Lt. Col. Philip Snow, head of a hand-picked team of specialists sworn to send a man safely into space and back, wrestling with a test gone wrong. Grounded, near-future hard SF rich in the real machinery of the space program. Read it for procedural, dawn-of-the-space-age SF about the men and the medicine behind the launch.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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