Dwight V. Swain 40 min read

At nearly four in his windowless basement lab, Horning tightens the last connection and writes his wife a farewell: by the time she reads it, he'll have crossed to another plane.

Dwight V. Swain's 1952 story is a sharp alternate-history and social-SF tale of a scientist's desperate escape. Clever, driven golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man trapped in an unhappy life gambles everything on crossing into a parallel world, and finds the grass is stranger on the other side.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry