Jack Lewis 41 min read

Three men lounge in shirtsleeves on Venus, breathing an atmosphere of chlorine and ammonia that should kill in thirty seconds, the pictures lied, they must lie. Or is the truth even stranger?

Jack Lewis's 1953 story spins a wry first-contact and colonization mystery from an impossible photograph. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a curious man's hunt for the trick behind a faked Venus picture leads to a truth far odder than any forgery.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal