Bill Wesley 25 min read

Captain Grimes chides his engineer for calling Primus by its banned old name, Mercury, five years since the Service outlawed it, and Manson has slipped up three times this trip.

Bill Wesley's 1954 story is an atmospheric psi-powers space opera of a haunted planet. Sharp, eerie golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an old name clings stubbornly to a world men are forbidden to speak of, and the curse of Primus proves more than mere superstition as a ship nears its shadow.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Joseph Eberle