"This Was the Only Way Out"

"Third from the Sun."

By Richard Matheson (1926-2013; Wikipedia HERE; ISFDb HERE; SFE HERE; IMDb HERE).

Illustration by [Paul] Callé (1928-2010; ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Galaxy, October 1950 (first issue).

Reprinted many times (ISFDb HERE).

Book collection online at The Luminist Archives (HERE).

Filmed for The Twilight Zone TV series in 1960 (WARNING! SPOILERS! in both: IMDb HERE and Wikipedia HERE).

Short short story (6 pages).

Online at SFFAudio (HERE).

   "The green planet with the single moon."

WHAT would you do if you believed there was no tomorrow?

Principal characters (none with names):

~ The father, his wife, and their children, and their neighbor, his wife, and their children.

Reference and resources:

- "The ship quivered a brief second":

  Evidently engineers have somehow overcome a major obstacle to spaceflight:

  "Gravity is such a pesky thing. It prevents us from doing all sorts of wonderful things. Such as floating through the air like a balloon, traveling into orbit without paying an ugly cost in delta V, and being morbidly obese but still light on your feet like Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.

  "By the same token, it would also be incredibly useful to be able to create gravity on command. Then you could do things like create artificial gravity inside your space-craft without unwieldy centrifuges, preventing the crew from getting killed by multi-gee acceleration, and make attractor beams." (Atomic Rockets HERE; also see Wikipedia HERE and HERE.)

- The Twilight Zone Vortex site has comprehensive coverage of (and notes about plot changes for) "Third from the Sun" (WARNING! SPOILERS! HERE), as does TV Tropes (WARNING! SPOILERS! HERE).

- Other stories that ONTOS has featured which were adapted to the Twilight Zone series: Charles Beaumont's "The Beautiful People" (HERE), Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" (HERE), and Lyn Venable's "Time Enough at Last" (HERE; see "References and resources").

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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