Jack Lewis 31 min read

The liner comes in low over Centauri IV, passengers laughing as a joke voice announces transfers for Orion and Antares, for this is as far as anyone is going, the very end of the line.

Jack Lewis's 1956 story sets a first-contact and colonization tale on a world of two utterly different faces. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story about a frontier planet at the edge of human reach, whose split nature gives it its ominous name.

In its time

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

Reading it

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