Algis Budrys 15 min read

To young Phildee, the feed-house loft is a fort, a foxhole, a B-72, whatever his mood demands. Today it is a jumping-off place, as the boy climbs the man-sized rungs to something more.

Algis Budrys's 1953 story is a tender first-contact and space-opera tale of a special child and his imagination. Warm, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a lonely boy's games of make-believe in a farm loft turn out to open onto something wondrously real.

In its time

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

Reading it

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