Recoil

Walter Franks lounges in the director’s office, half‑heartedly sipping Scotch and tossing cigarettes, while his secretary Jeanne flirts with him over a stack of confidential mail. Their banter masks a serious agenda: Franks is on the brink of testing a daring new device—a massive electron gun designed to blast meteoroids out of the path of interplanetary traffic. The concept is as audacious as it is risky, promising to turn a routine communications network into a shield against the relentless hazards of space.

Set against the bustling backdrop of a post‑war space industry, the story follows Franks and his team as they scramble to perfect the prototype before the looming pressures of corporate profit and government oversight catch up. Their uneasy partnership, laced with humor and rivalry, drives a tension‑filled race to prove that a beam of electrons can indeed keep the heavens safe for the ships that cross them.