David Mason 8 min read

The highway runs ruler-straight to both horizons, black and shining like a river of ink, and at Rest Stop 25, the lone attendant Sam sits blank-faced at the lunch counter as the phone grunts to life.

David Mason's 1963 story builds eerie AI-and-horror atmosphere from a lonely automated highway rest stop. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a deserted roadside stop and its bored attendant conceal something quietly, deeply wrong.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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