All his life Gunnison has hunted wealth where other men feared to go. Asteroids, frozen worlds, abandoned colonies—he has chased every rumor of riches and watched fortune slip away every time. Now, with little time left and nothing to show for decades of risk, he makes one final gamble.
His destination is the Ghanati, a forbidden region of Mars where the Interplanetary government executes trespassers on sight. The place has a reputation that keeps sane men away: razor-sharp crags, strange creatures rumored to live among the ruins, and skies haunted by vicious black birds. But the Ghanati also carries another rumor—one whispered by prospectors and smugglers alike. Gold.
Gunnison knows the risks. The law is against him. The terrain could kill him. And if the stories about the inhabitants of the Ghanati are true, he may not even survive the first day. But after a lifetime of watching other men walk away with the treasure, he refuses to die wondering whether this was the strike he should have taken.
What he finds inside the forbidden land is stranger than any story he has heard. The gold is real. The dangers are real. And the people who live there are nothing like the monsters the universe believes them to be.
But in a place where the smallest mistake can mean death, even the richest discovery may come too late.
Dick Purcell wrote “Gunnison’s Bonanza” during the early boom years of planetary adventure fiction. Stories like this captured the spirit of the old prospecting tales of the American West and projected them outward into the Solar System, replacing frontier deserts with alien worlds and lonely miners with star-hopping fortune hunters. Purcell contributed several short works to the science fiction magazines of the mid 1950s, writing fast-paced tales of explorers, smugglers, and opportunists who pushed past the edges of mapped space in search of the next strike.
