Time Fuze
This is classic hard SF with a genuinely chilling premise: humanity's first faster-than-light journey may have killed a star. Commander Benedict and physicist Dr. Leicher watch in horror as a star goes nova in their wake, and realize the ultradrive that carried them to the stars might do the same to Earth. The math is devastating. The odds of coincidence are impossible. They did this. And now they must somehow return home without igniting their own sun. Garrett writes with the terse confidence of mid-century SF, letting the science do the heavy lifting while his characters sit with an unbearable question: what do you do when your greatest achievement is also your worst mistake? The ending doesn't resolve, it leaves Benedict and Leicher facing an impossible choice, and the reader with the chill of genuine cosmic dread. For fans of early Asimov, Jack Vance, and any story that treats space travel as genuinely dangerous.
