Henry Still 34 min read

'This pickup's got to be good,' Kevin Morrow growls, gulping bitter coffee as he watches a gleaming moonship tug at her mooring lines outside the slowly turning space station.

Henry Still's 1955 story is a taut hard-SF and social-SF tale of pressure and politics on a space station. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a crucial orbital operation, a meddling official, and a slow-burning resentment come to a head in the cold vacuum above Earth.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas