Jack Douglas 6 min read

'They are our markings,' the old doctor admits, whiskey bottle tight in his gnarled hand, 'identical. But not our paint.' And Captain Baird turns back to the strange rocket strewn in careful pieces.

Jack Douglas's 1959 story is a taut hard-SF space opera of an unsettling discovery. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a tense little mystery where a test rocket comes back bearing markings that are exactly, impossibly the station's own, but painted by no human hand.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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