Turnover Point

Turnover Point is a brutal, quiet story about the last act of a man the universe forgot. Pop Ganlon has spent years drifting through the asteroid belt, hauling scrap and avoiding the weight of his own existence. His only pride was his son, a Patrol officer who died in a back alley on Mars, killed by a criminal named John Kane. Pop buried his grief in cheap liquor and rust, and might have drifted all the way to oblivion if fate hadn't put Kane in his passenger seat. The killer doesn't know who Pop is. Pop doesn't know who's sitting in his cockpit. But when the truth comes out 200,000 miles from anywhere, the old spaceman faces a choice: die quietly, or take his revenge. Coppel writes with the stripped-down intensity of 1950s hard SF, but beneath the rocket fuel there's something timeless: the question of whether a forgotten man can matter, even if only in his final moment. The ending doesn't offer redemption so much as a terrible clarity, the kind that comes when you have nothing left to lose.