Charles L. Fontenay 23 min read

Trella fears trouble even before her drunk escort passes out, the two evil-looking men at the next table in the squalid Ganymede saloon have been watching her, and now they shift in their chairs.

Charles L. Fontenay's 1959 story is a tense psi-powers space opera of danger and hidden power. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens in a rough dome-colony dive and unfolds a secret of formidable strength, where the Jupiter weapon of the title proves to be something no one expects.

In its time

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

Reading it

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