
In the frozen reaches of Pluto, three eerie green moons cast an otherworldly glow over a bleak penal colony where hope is a scarce commodity. Rusty Carter, a hardened journalist from Earth, finds himself among the exiled, his body stripped to raw muscle by the planet’s relentless cold and the ever‑present threat of the alien “Bugs.” The landscape is a jagged mix of crystal sand and silica cliffs, a stark backdrop for a society of desperate strangers gathered around a single, hopeful departure ship.
Carter’s presence isn’t accidental—he was sent on a covert assignment, a staged bank robbery turned false arrest, all to secure a sensational story from the most forbidding frontier. As the countdown to the ship’s launch ticks down, he navigates a tense crowd of interplanetary inmates, the looming promise of Earth’s soil mingling with the stark reality of survival on an alien world. The first act sets the stage for a gritty tale of deception, endurance, and the thin line between freedom and exile.
Language
en
Duration
~56 minutes (54K 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
2020-04-04
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
A fast-moving pulp science fiction writer, he burst onto magazine pages around 1940 with energetic space operas full of danger, robots, and far-off worlds. Several of those stories still circulate today through Project Gutenberg, giving modern readers an easy way to sample his work.
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