Henry Guth 28 min read

Communication with Earth is dead as a vacuum, and Darrel Bond grins, a bored button-pusher who broke the rules, swung his automatic freighter outside Uranus, and now faces the mystery of Neptune.

Henry Guth's 1948 story is a wry first-contact space opera of a rule-breaking pilot and a strange world. Colorful, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a spacer's boredom-driven detour beyond the outer planets lands him in something wonderfully unexpected.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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