Alan Edward Nourse 11 min read

A perfectly ordinary-looking man, hunted-eyed and lost, pleads with Morgan to believe him, before it ends in a mental hospital.

Alan E. Nourse's 1963 story opens on a chilling exchange between the desperate stranger and the skeptical Morgan, building an unsettling space-opera mystery around a man who claims to be truly lost. Sharp, tense golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping tale that hangs its dread on one frightened, too-ordinary man.

In its time

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

Reading it

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