James Blish 31 min read

In a snug English coffee house two hundred years before the bomb craters, cheerful talk swirls through pipe-smoke, until a slip lands a modern man somewhere he was never meant to be.

James Blish's 1948 story is an inventive blend of fantasy and alternate history, a tale of dimensions and mistaken passage. Sharp, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a clever story where a single error opens a doorway into a strange and perilous elsewhere.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay