Nelson S. Bond 33 min read

A ship under sealed wartime orders loses its cook to indigestion, and the mate is sent onto Mars' inner moon to find a replacement, no easy job in wartime.

Nelson S. Bond's 1942 story opens with a comic predicament aboard the Leo, forced down on Phobos to recruit a cook while at war with the Outer Planets. Breezy, good-humored golden-age space opera with a salty narrator. Read it for genial pulp SF that finds the human comedy in the machinery of interplanetary war.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Don Lynch