Edmond Hamilton 34 min read

He lies in the gutter, the taste of whiskey and defeat in his mouth, a tape playing over and over in his mind: you're through, Hayden, all washed up, boy genius, right down from the top to the bottom.

Edmond Hamilton's 1956 story is an atmospheric psi-powers space opera of a fallen man's redemption. Vivid, driven golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a ruined genius at rock bottom is drawn into a strange destiny, and the man with the golden eyes offers a chance at something far beyond the gutter.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry