Stephen Bartholomew 15 min read

Alone in a leaking spacecraft far from Pacific Grove, California, a man releases a rubber balloon to drift toward the leak, knowing he will never smell the eucalyptus of home again.

Stephen Bartholomew's 1963 story builds a quiet, poignant colonization and social-SF tale around one man's crisis in the void. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a moving story of ingenuity and homesickness, as a stranded traveler faces the last resort between him and death.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

George Schelling