Charles Dye 11 min read

Just because an event 'has to' happen, some think it surely will, but it ain't necessarily so, and Ballard has only hours to see the answer before his eyes before it's too late.

Charles Dye's 1951 story is a taut hard-SF and time-travel puzzle set among the asteroid beacon-markers. Sharp, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a tense race-against-time story where a man must solve a deadly problem whose solution is hiding in plain sight.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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