Ray Bradbury 27 min read

Click Hathaway keeps his camera rolling as the meteor strikes and the ship spins like a cosmic merry-go-round, he knows he's getting a damned sweet picture of everything that's happening.

Ray Bradbury's 1944 story is a rollicking early space-opera adventure. Vivid, fast, pulpy fun. Read it for young Bradbury in pure pulp-adventure mode, a wisecracking newsreel cameraman and a two-fisted spaceman marooned on a deadly asteroid, facing the sinister secret of the monster maker.

In its time

Published in 1944, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Joseph Doolin