George O. Smith 59 min read

Fifteen minutes of transmission lag mean the mighty Nilamo of Yoralen can't simply telephone Terra, a small hitch that hints at the tangled business of interplanetary communication.

George O. Smith's 1942 story is a clever hard-SF space opera from his classic Venus Equilateral relay-station series. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a story that mines the real physics of space communication for ingenuity and intrigue, from a master of technical SF.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

William A. Kolliker