Frederik Pohl 52 min read

Mooney looks out his window at the harsh Jersey shore, and the sky flares sudden, bright, and cold, then vanishes, twenty miles across the bay from New York, but a world away in a December gale.

Frederik Pohl's 1957 story is a wry social-SF and time-travel tale of an unexpected windfall. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a genial Pohl story where a down-on-his-luck man's chance discovery on a storm-battered coast turns out to be a survival kit from somewhere, and somewhen, unexpected.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Jack Gaughan