George O. Smith 14 min read

Billy Enright, first Earthman ever to beat the speed of light, is finally coming home, but a man gone eighteen months in a ship stocked for ten days makes the authorities more than a little curious.

George O. Smith's 1953 story spins a sharp hard-SF space opera from an impossibly long journey and its aftermath. Clever, suspenseful golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a triumphant homecoming raises questions no one can quite answer about where the hero really was.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas