Frederik Pohl 47 min read

One moment Herrell McCray is ship's navigator on the Long Jump to Betelgeuse Nine; the next, inexplicably, he is scared and alone in a cell-sized room, with no business being anywhere but spaceborne.

Frederik Pohl's 1963 story is a gripping first-contact and space-opera puzzle. Sharp, inventive golden-age SF. Read it for a taut mystery where a navigator snatched from his ship into a strange prison must piece together where he is and who has taken him, in a clever tale of contact across an unbridgeable gulf.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

George Schelling