Clyde Beck 40 min read

A blowout in deep space is easy to diagnose and impossible to fix, spaceships don't carry spare drive tubes.

Clyde Beck's 1950 story strands its narrator in free fall aboard the little Aspera with a burst tube and no spare, a hard-SF predicament of survival and ingenuity. Tense, competent golden-age space opera. Read it for a lean man-versus-vacuum tale where the trouble is obvious and the solution is anything but.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal