Lester Del Rey 12 min read

He wanted, above anything, to go back into space, and he'd been waiting a long, long time, trapped among planetlubbers with their speeches and their eligible daughters.

Lester del Rey's 1963 story aches with the longing of a deep-space hero stranded on Earth for a corporate anniversary. Sharp, character-driven golden-age SF. Read it for a story about a man whose eyes keep drifting to the stars, and the mistake that keeps him grounded.

In its time

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

Reading it

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