Incident by Thomas J. O’Hara _A prize-winning story emanating from a college course eminently successful and pioneering will, we are sure, be of paramount interest to our readers. The idea was happily suggested and guided by our book critic, Mr. Robert Frazier and by another editor, Mr. Samuel Moskowitz, who conduct in able association the SCIENCE FANTASY WRITERS' WORKSHOP at the College of the City of New York (School of General Studies, Extension Division, Fall-Winter Semester recently concluded). Mr. Frazier and Mr. Moskowitz made a careful selection of the most promising stories submitted by their students and the editors of FANTASTIC UNIVERSE acted in a further advisory capacity in deciding on a winning entry to be published in our May issue. We think you'll agree that Thomas O'Hara's fine story was a most felicitous choice._ =A floating coffin was the ship, its lone survivor specter-gaunt and adrift in a pitiless universe.= He was, now, the last one left alive. The captain had gone first, quietly and without preparation. There had been no hint of the plague’s coming--no slightest premonition of death. There had been only the briefest of preliminaries: the sudden, burning fever; the quick decay of flesh and the bright-hued, bursting sores. Then had come the terrible vertigo and the brief mindless interval before the agonizing end. The next two had gone a little easier. The second mate had simply not awakened one morning, and the third victim, the engineer who guarded and supervised the workings of the great uranium-fission chambers that drove the mighty star-ship, had noticed at first only a mounting vertigo which was swiftly followed by a fever which brought a bright flush to his cheeks. Reeling, he had clutched at the rail guarding the edge of the power-machines, then, before he could sound an alarm or cry out for help, a sudden fatal spasm convulsed him. With a soundless shriek he plunged headlong into the mass of throbbing machinery, and burning, radio-active material. A moment later, like a great burst of flame, his remains dissolved into a million tiny, glowing fragments that flashed from the great exhaust tubes to a final end in the cold wastes of space. Like a glowing nimbus, his final, mortal atoms spun round the ship--a halo of radiant death cleansed and purified by the absolute-zero cold and the burning heat of energy-breakdown. The fourth victim was wiser by far--he killed himself before he became infected. There had been six of them plunging headlong at tremendous speeds through the darkness of a night that was beyond all reckoning, plunging endlessly through a sea that knew no charting, nor had heard of any shore-line. The flames of endless giant suns had shot past, the tiny, beckoning eyes of a thousand planets, and yet they had passed onward to a greater goal.