Les Cole 36 min read

With his last yellow pill taken and less than an hour of life left, a dying man walks the eerie, deserted dark of an early-morning Disneyland, hunting a monster that looks utterly harmless.

Les Cole's 1953 story is a taut social-SF and space-opera thriller of a desperate, timed hunt. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping story where a doomed man races the clock through an empty amusement park to find an innocuous-seeming menace before he dies.

In its time

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

Reading it

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