George O. Smith 52 min read

Walter Franks lounges in the director's chair, feet on the desk, smoking the director's cigarettes and drinking his Scotch, the director being off on Mars honeymooning with his own secretary.

George O. Smith's 1943 story is a clever hard-SF space opera from his Venus Equilateral series. Sharp, witty golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale of relay-station engineers whose easygoing banter frames an ingenious technical crisis, from a master of the form.

In its time

Published in 1943, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban