Dick Purcell 15 min read

'That's damned expensive,' Gunnison says, counting out coins of every planet to a pilot with a forged license, the going rate for being set down among the dangerous Ghanati.

Dick Purcell's 1956 story opens on a desperate, high-priced journey into hostile territory, building a colonization space opera. Atmospheric, driven golden-age SF. Read it for a story of a man who pays a smuggler's ransom to reach a forbidden world, chasing a bonanza worth the risk.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Lloyd Rognan