Raymond F. Jones 48 min read

How do you fill a pipette and measure half a c.c. of hydrochloric acid into a test tube, from a quarter million miles away? Not, it turns out, quite so simply as it sounds.

Raymond F. Jones's 1962 story is a clever hard-SF and first-contact tale of remote lunar experiments gone strange. Sharp, ingenious golden-age SF. Read it for a story where robotic chemistry on the Moon, performed by remote control from Earth, uncovers a reason the title's warning ought to be heeded.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay