James McKimmey 19 min read

Twelve years into a voyage, a spaceman finds human eyes watching from an impossible planet.

Three miles from his rocket on a world that should hold no people, William Kirk glimpses blond hair and a human face through the alien brush, and remembers his partner's uneasy warning that this is the kind of planet where you go no further. McKimmey builds dread out of isolation, superstition, and a spacer's frayed nerves, the far-from-home quiet doing most of the work. Read it for a tense, moody piece of 1950s planetary exploration where the real danger is what the mind supplies.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Philip B. Parsons