Hal Clement 35 min read

Mercury has no atmosphere, everyone knows that. So why is it suddenly developing one, as quakes wrack the ground and a rising wind nearly wrecks the Albireo's landing?

Hal Clement's 1963 story is a superb hard-SF puzzle of planetary science, from a master of rigorous, ingenious world-building. Sharp, absorbing golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping scientific mystery on a hostile world, where the physics is the adventure.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay