
Part 1
Part 2
On the barren, magnet‑charged asteroid Echo, Earthman Neal Bormon finds himself enslaved by the Martians, forced to haul heavy baskets of glittering rhodium through a silent, air‑thin landscape. The planet’s strange pull holds his iron‑capped boots to the rocky walls, while a distant, ominous chasm houses a massive, enigmatic ore‑consuming machine. Bormon’s daily struggle is a race against a dwindling oxygen supply and the relentless demands of his alien overseers.
Driven by the disappearance of his friend Keith Calbur, Bormon pushes beyond the grinding labor, following faint clues through the eerie, sound‑less halls of the mining complex. As he drags his loaded basket toward the yawning abyss, the glow of the machinery grows brighter, hinting at secrets buried deep within the asteroid’s core. The tension of survival and the mystery of the Martian operation combine to create a gripping, atmospheric sci‑fi adventure that pulls listeners into a world where every breath counts.
Language
en
Duration
~33 minutes (32K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
Apr 16, 2020
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1911–1988
Best known for the novel Famous All Over Town, he built a career that ranged from science fiction to screenwriting and only later revealed that he had also written under the pen name Danny Santiago. His work is remembered for its range and for the surprise of the voice behind one of the most acclaimed novels about Los Angeles barrio life.
View all books
by D. L. (Daniel Lewis) James

by Friedrich Gerstäcker

by Ernest Thompson Seton

by Albert Bigelow Paine

by Alfred John Church

by John Bennett