William Tenn 23 min read

Graff Dingle watches yellow mold form around the stiletto hole in his arm and smells the first faint jasmine of the disease, five and a half hours, by his reckoning, before it kills him.

William Tenn's 1953 story is a colorful, hard-edged colonization adventure of a lethal alien plague. Vivid, sharp golden-age SF. Read it for a rousing frontier tale where a tough colonist, infected and racing the clock, must find the cure before the jasmine-scented virus finishes him.

In its time

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

Reading it

23 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal