Leroy Yerxa 46 min read

On a wind- and rain-swept dock, old Holly O'Toole grips the hand of Jeff Blake, home at last from long years in space, a hell of a night, he says, for a man to come home.

Leroy Yerxa's 1942 story opens on a bittersweet homecoming, building a post-apocalyptic space opera. Atmospheric, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a story where a spacer's long-awaited return to a storm-lashed port turns out to be the start, not the end, of his ordeal.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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