Jack Williamson 44 min read

What lies above the mysterious Heaviside Layer, that unreachable barrier high in the sky? A daring flight means to pierce it, and find a second shell around the world.

Jack Williamson's 1929 story is a rousing hard-SF and space-opera adventure. Vivid, imaginative golden-age pulp. Read it for early Williamson wonder, an aerial expedition to breach the enigmatic upper atmosphere, packed with adventure and speculative science, in the exuberant, science-marveling style of the earliest Gernsback-era pulps.

In its time

Published in 1929, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Frank R. Paul