Leigh Brackett 31 min read

Naked but for a welded silver collar, MacVickers stands at the brink of a dark shaft sunk beneath the thin blue-green mud of Io, seized by the certainty that once he goes down, he's down for good.

Leigh Brackett's 1942 story is a vivid, atmospheric space-opera adventure of captivity and menace on Io. Colorful, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a rousing tale of a defiant prisoner on Jupiter's moon, plunging into a mystery in the mud-drowned dark.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Frank R. Paul