
In a bleak December, an eccentric scientist obsessed with beating death builds a strange rocket to launch his own corpse into the void. His radical plan—preserving the body in a cosmic coffin far from Earth’s pull—drives him to construct a leaning tower and a radium‑propelled craft hidden on his estate. When the professor dies, his nephew Douglas is bound by a cryptic will to carry out the final, secretive steps, sliding the sealed body into the sleek vessel and pulling the launch lever before the five‑minute countdown expires.
The story unfolds with tense, atmospheric detail, from snow‑laden fields to the humming launch pad that pierces the night sky. As the rocket roars upward, the listener is left to wonder whether humanity’s quest for eternal life can truly escape the laws of nature—or if the heavens have their own plans. A classic blend of early‑20th‑century scientific imagination and chilling suspense, it invites contemplation of ambition, secrecy, and the unknown frontier beyond Earth.
Language
en
Duration
~1 hours (59K characters)
Series
Professor Jameson
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Original publisher
United States: Fictioneers, Inc.,1942.
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2022-10-14
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1909–1988
A quietly influential pulp-era science fiction writer, he helped imagine ideas that later became staples of the genre, from advanced robots to suspended animation. Best known for the Professor Jameson stories, he brought a cool, cosmic sense of wonder to early magazine science fiction.
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