Calling the Empress

In the void between worlds, a ship carries no knowledge of the plague awaiting its arrival. When the Empress of Kolain sets course for Venus, the planet is in the grip of Venusian Fever, and no one can warn them. Don Channing and Walt Franks at the Venus Equilateral relay station must accomplish something never done before: contact a ship in flight across millions of miles and convince it to turn back. The technology doesn't exist yet. They've never tried. But the alternative is watching 347 people walk into a death sentence. What follows is pure golden age SF at its best, a desperate engineering problem solved with beam antennas and brute-force mathematics, a boy hero, and the sheer audacity of believing humanity can outtalk the speed of light. Written in 1943, it carries the wartime faith that smart people working together can solve anything. For fans of early Asimov, Doc Smith, or anyone who wants to remember when science fiction believed the future was something we'd build with our hands.