Algis Budrys 25 min read

Fifteen patient years of painstaking work, all to build an exit that can be used only once, as an aging professor sits on a Berlin bench in a world where Germany won the war.

Algis Budrys's 1958 story is a poignant alternate-history and hard-SF tale of a scientist reaching for a different past. Moving, elegant golden-age SF. Read it for a beautiful, melancholy story of a man in a victorious Nazi Germany building a door to the world that should have been.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Bill Bowman