Raymond Z. Gallun 35 min read

Red deceleration lights wink on as five hundred Survey Service men brace in their bunks, bound for Mercury, the Paradox World, only the second time Terrans have ever reached it.

Raymond Z. Gallun's 1953 story sends a colonizing expedition to a hostile, ruined world in a taut post-apocalyptic space opera. Vivid, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping tale of hard men reaching a forbidding planet, and the world they hope to give back.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal