Frank Belknap Long 19 min read

We stood before the airlock, the old man and I, and watched them go out, onto Mercury's sunward face, where lakes of molten zinc simmer at 790 degrees, to mine uranium on the Sun's firstling.

Frank Belknap Long's 1941 story is an atmospheric colonization and horror tale of the innermost planet. Vivid, chilling golden-age pulp. Read it for a moody story of miners toiling on scorching Mercury, where a green young officer confronts the deadly hazards of the hot face, and the Mercurian menace that haunts it.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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