TY  - BOOK
AU  - O'Hara,Thomas J.
AU  - Hunter,Mel
TI  - Incident
T2  - Produced from Fantastic Universe, May 1955 (Vol. 3, No. 4.)
AV  - PS 
PY  - 2026///
CY  - Salt Lake City, UT
PB  - Project Gutenberg
KW  - Science fiction
KW  - Short stories
KW  - Diseases -- Fiction
KW  - Space ships -- Fiction
KW  - Interstellar travel -- Fiction
N1  - Release date is 2026-05-22; Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive); Originally published; New York: King-Size Publications, Inc., 1955
N2  - Incident by Thomas J. O'Hara is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It centers on a deep-space expedition turned disaster when a lethal, mysterious plague ravages the crew, culminating in the lone survivor’s moral decision as he nears a seemingly hospitable world.

The story follows six astronauts on the first great galactic voyage as a fast, terrible illness fells them one by one: the captain dies suddenly, another never wakes, the engineer staggers into the reactor, and one man chooses suicide to avoid infection. Infected himself and approaching a life-bearing planet, the last survivor realizes landing would spread the plague to its inhabitants. He chooses sacrifice, setting the controls that will destroy the ship. The scene then shifts to a peaceful valley where a couple watches a “shooting star,” revealing the world below is Earth and that the hero’s act passes as a quiet, unnoticed incident. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
UR  - https://archive.org/details/FantasticUniverseV03n04195505ATLPM/page/n3/mode/2up
UR  - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78725
ER  -