Wilson Tucker 27 min read

'What I say goes around here!' Roberds means to pilot the ship to Earth himself, emergency or no, Consulate or no, with a sick girl aboard and the sinister Rat lurking in his office.

Wilson Tucker's 1942 story is a fast space-opera adventure of a desperate flight from a prison world. Sharp, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a rousing tale where a defiant man risks everything on a mercy run off a penal planet, with menace at his heels.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Damon Knight