Ralph Sloan 21 min read

A needle gun trained on the prisoner, Lt. Mike Logan has spent three hours sneaking past the guards of the transient prison, and, back from two months on Pluto's ice cliffs, he means to kill.

Ralph Sloan's 1949 story is a hard-boiled military space opera of vengeance among the outer planets. Tense, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a gripping tale of a haunted, exhausted officer bent on murder, and the ordeal that awaits him in the dark of space.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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