H. B. Fyfe 23 min read

An hour before he must brake for landing, freighter pilot Pete Dudley catches his fingers nervously drumming and snaps at himself, get the jitters now and Jack sends someone else on the Mars run.

H. B. Fyfe's 1953 story is a taut hard-SF space opera of a routine lunar landing gone unexpectedly complicated. Sharp, well-observed golden-age SF. Read it for a tense, human tale of a spacer whose ordinary run to Luna turns into anything but.

In its time

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

Reading it

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