Winston K. Marks 18 min read

A beer-truck driver with an inquiring mind loses a whole weekend to a home experiment gone wrong, one that worked far too well, in the case of a substance that eats water.

Winston K. Marks's 1953 story is a wry, cautionary hard-SF and social-SF tale. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial everyman comedy of science run amok, where an amateur's tinkering unleashes something that can't be stopped, in a light golden-age fable about the danger of experiments that succeed all too thoroughly.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Balbalis