Edward W. Ludwig 22 min read

Forty days of heaven and forty nights of hell, that's how it's been, and a young man aching to reach the stars carries a gnawing fear that bursts out like an evil jack-in-the-box each night.

Edward W. Ludwig's 1951 story is a poignant social-SF space opera of a spaceman's secret dread. Sensitive, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a moving story, framed as a letter to a woman named Laura, of a man torn between his lifelong dream of space and the terror that haunts him.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Thorne