Murray F. Yaco 30 min read

For the first time in two hundred years, the emergency light flashes on at lonely Communications Relay Station 43.4SC, and the captain who supposedly sent the call flatly denies it.

Murray F. Yaco's 1959 story spins a clever hard-SF and space-opera puzzle from an impossible distress signal. Sharp, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a green operator at a forgotten outpost must make sense of a call that no one admits to sending.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Grayam