Randall Garrett 24 min read

Ted Kendall waits with thinly-concealed impatience in the unheated outer office of Mars' Space Service, cursing the red tape that keeps him anchored on this cold, miserable pebble of a planet.

Randall Garrett's 1957 story is a brisk space-opera adventure of a grounded pilot's predicament. Fast, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a rousing tale where a spacepilot's overdue reflex checkup and a heap of bureaucracy strand him on Mars, until fortune, or misfortune, takes a hand.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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