Part of Series
The odds were against them every step of the way. "Drugged with figures, working more and more from sheer obstinacy, stubbornly trying everything I could think of to try, I came up with the conclusion that our chances of getting to Mars, when we left the soil of Earth, had been about a thousand to one against. And they weren't very much better now." Bill Easson has made it out of Earth's doomed atmosphere in his lifeship - with ten Earthling expats in tow - but countless questions had followed them. Was Earth really doomed? How many more lives could they have saved with more time to prepare? Would there even be enough fuel to get to Mars? And to what lengths will they go to get themselves there?
Author
J. T. McIntosh is a pseudonym used by Scottish writer and journalist James Murdoch MacGregor. Living largely in Aberdeen, Scotland, MacGregor used the McIntosh pseudonym (along with its variants J. T. MacIntosh, and J. T. M'Intosh) as well as "H. J. Murdoch", "Gregory Francis" (with Frank H. Parnell), and "Stuart Winsor" (with Jeff Mason) for all his science fiction work, which was the majority of his output, though he did publish books under his own name. His first story, "The Curfew Tolls", appeared in Astounding Science Fiction during 1950, and his first novel, World Out of Mind, was published during 1953. He did not publish any work after 1980. In 2010, following his death in 2008, the National Library of Scotland purchased his literary papers and correspondence. Along with John Mather and Edith Dell, he is credited for the screenplay for the colour feature film Satellite in the Sky (1956).
