Boyd Ellanby 22 min read

Three scientists play what may be the last poker game, every card a deuce, and all life on Earth at stake.

Boyd Ellanby's 1956 story deals its tense hand in an Arizona confinement, the gaunt, skull-headed Rothman and his colleagues gambling against an unfolding catastrophe. Taut, atmospheric hard SF about a doomsday reaction and the men who might stop it. Read it for gripping golden-age suspense played out over a grim game of cards.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

22 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Doktor