Robert Abernathy 26 min read

For forty hours the Quest III has decelerated toward yet another star, its crew sated with wonders but sick with despair, searching, across an empty galaxy, for a single world where men might dwell.

Robert Abernathy's 1949 story is a poignant, atmospheric first-contact and military-SF tale of returning wanderers. Sharp, melancholy golden-age SF. Read it for a story of star-voyagers coming home after ages away, only to find the Earth they left transformed, and their long-awaited return anything but the homecoming they dreamed.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Jerome Bixby