
Part 1
The story opens on an exuberant April morning in 1982, when a whole city erupts in song, color, and celebration. A towering rocket, dubbed the Lunar Lady, stands ready to launch humanity’s first flight to the moon, and the charismatic, leg‑less Captain George Everson commands the cheers of millions. Amid the marching bands and jubilant crowds, the atmosphere feels like a grand, hopeful carnival of progress.
But not everyone shares the optimism. Jeffrey Simon, a weather‑worn former spaceman, watches the spectacle from his modest apartment, haunted by a sense of betrayal and a lingering dream that was never his. Clutching a mysterious glowing stone and an old photograph of a forgotten launch site, he prepares to act on a desperate plan that could shatter the illusion of triumph and force the world to confront the true cost of its ambitions.
Language
en
Duration
~26 minutes (25K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Original publisher
United States: Royal Publications, Inc,1955.
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2022-02-04
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
1920–1990
A mid-century writer and editor with one foot in science fiction and the other in history, he published inventive magazine stories and later gathered some of them in a collection of fantastic tales. His work has the feel of classic pulp-era speculation, but with an editor’s eye for shape and pacing.
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