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Military veteran Mel Gray has been consigned to the frontier planet of Mercury as a virtual prisoner, helping to build a new colony. John Moulton and his daughter Jill have a dream of building Mercury into a haven for unemployed veterans like Mel. Mel has a different dream&mspace;escape.

This classic science fiction short story by Leigh Brackett was first published in Comet magazine in July 1941.

Leigh Brackett (1915-1978) was an American science fiction author. Most of Brackett's science fiction can be characterized as space opera or planetary romance. Almost all of her stories take place within a common invented universe, which contains richly detailed fictional versions of the consensus Mars and Venus of science fiction in the 1930s-1950s.

Brackett was also a screenwriter, known for her work on films such as The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

Brackett was married to fellow scifi author Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977).