Read "The Second Shell" by Jack Williamson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was two o'clock in the morning of September 5, 1939. For a year and a half I had been at work on the San Francisco _Times_. I had come there immediately after finishing my year's course at the army officers' flying school at San Antonio, on the chance that my work would lead me into enough tong wars and exciting murder mysteries to make life interesting.
The morning edition had just been "put to bed" and I was starting out of the office when the night editor called me to meet a visitor who had just come in. The stranger came forward quickly. Roughly clad in blue shirt and overalls, boots, and Stetson, he had the bronze skin, clear eyes, and smooth movements of one who has spent his life out-of-doors.