"It isn't so bad," says one of the men who are with you inside this ultimate room. "Fifty years from now, the rest of us will all be old, or dead." And then you're waking again, and you think, Fifty years. you think. It's been fifty years. But another part of your mind says, No, it is only tomorrow morning. It isn't the dying itself. It's what comes before. The waiting, alone in a room without windows, trying to think. The opening of the door, the voices of the men who are going with you but not all the way, the walk down the corridor to the airlock room, the faces of the men, closed and impersonal. They do not enjoy this. Neither do they shrink from it. It's their job.

Author Biography

Edmond Moore Hamilton (1904 - 1977) was an American writer of science fiction during the mid-twentieth century. Edmond Hamilton's career as a science fiction writer began with the publication of "The Monster God of Mamurth," a short story, in the August 1926 issue of Weird Tales-now a classic magazine of alternative fiction. Hamilton quickly became a central member of the remarkable group of Weird Tales writers assembled by editor Farnsworth Wright, that included H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Weird Tales would publish 79 works of fiction by Hamilton from 1926 to 1948, making him one of the magazine's most prolific contributors. Hamilton became a friend and associate of several Weird Tales veterans, including E. Hoffmann Price and Otis Adelbert Kline; most notably, he struck up a 20-year friendship with close contemporary Jack Williamson, as Williamson records in his 1984 autobiography Wonder's Child. In the late 1930s Weird Tales printed several striking fantasy tales by Hamilton, most notably "He That Hath Wings" (July 1938), one of his most popular and frequently-reprinted pieces. Hamilton is wrote one of the first hardcover compilations of what would eventually come to be known as the science fiction genre, The Horror on The Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror (1936). The book compiles the following stories: "The Horror on the Asteroid," "The Accursed Galaxy," "The Man Who Saw Everything" ("The Man With the X-Ray Eyes"), "The Earth-Brain," "The Monster-God of Mamurth" and "The Man Who Evolved." On July 18, 2009, Kinsman, Ohio, "celebrated Edmond Hamilton Day, honoring 'The Dean of Science Fiction' and Kinsman resident.