D. W. Barefoot 33 min read

Sweating in the cool control room, Morley agonizes between waking the contemptuous Madsen and attempting a solo landing on Japetus, and knows the whole miserable predicament is his own fault.

D. W. Barefoot's 1954 story builds a taut hard-SF space opera around a man's crisis of nerve far from home. Sharp, tense golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping story of an inexperienced spacer facing an impossible choice above the moons of Saturn.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller