Vaughan Shelton 32 min read

As if Donner's troubles weren't bad enough, they were a repetition of something that had thrown the world into chaos thousands of years ago, with $300,000 missing and larceny in the air.

Vaughan Shelton's 1956 story is a clever hard-SF space opera and mystery of a scientist and a very old pattern. Sharp, intriguing golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a research foundation's troubles echo a catastrophe from the deep past, and the answer changes everything.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Weiss