Lester Del Rey 1 hr 8 min read

Eighteen men and two women, five months out toward Saturn in a sealed ship, and the narrator is three-quarters of the way to murder, sick of the feuding, when he realizes the very air is poisoned.

Lester del Rey's 1953 story is a taut hard-SF space opera of shipboard tension and sabotage. Sharp, claustrophobic golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping locked-room thriller in deep space, where the crew's frayed nerves are the least of the danger.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 8 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).