Stanley Mullen 41 min read

Under a sign reading VENUS TRANSPORT, CONTAMINATION AREA, KEEP OUT, an official warns Steve Coran he'll be in deadly danger the moment he leaves, hunting a ring of pirates and saboteurs.

Stanley Mullen's 1949 story is a rousing space-opera adventure of piracy and intrigue between the worlds. Vivid, fast golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful tale of a hard-boiled agent taking on a shadowy conspiracy of saboteurs bent on sparking interplanetary war.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams