Randall Garrett 42 min read

Reading in the cramped lounge of the cargo ship Persephone, bound for Pluto, hardly the vacation spot of the solar system, Jayjay Kelvin has no idea trouble is about to find him.

Randall Garrett's 1961 story is a brisk hard-SF space opera of ingenuity and danger on a run to the outer dark. Sharp, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a tale where a quiet passenger's know-how becomes the thin thread everyone's survival hangs by.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Douglas