Bryce Walton 25 min read

As Watchman aboard a man-made observational meteor drifting millions of miles from nowhere, Barton has two duties: keep the watch, and keep his sanity, and the psychologist keeps testing the second.

Bryce Walton's 1957 story is a tense, atmospheric psi-powers space opera of isolation. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a lone watchman in the deep void is studied for signs of madness, and the question of what is really happening to his mind grows quietly disturbing.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban