Gangway for Homer - The Prisoner...
George R. Hahn
Gangway for Homer by George R. Hahn - Here is an epic worthy of you, immortal bard. Arise, oh Homer, and hearken to the classic saga of Achilles Maravain! Gangway for Homer by George R. Hahn
His name was really John Smith. Incredibly enough, it had always been John Smith. As far back as people in his circle and neighborhood could remember, it had been John Smith—and they could remember back all the way to when he had been a mere tottering tot—to the swaddling clothes days. He was what might be called a medium man. His height was medium. His middle-age was medium. His hair, eyes, and nose were medium. Unpretentious he looked and adequate. He fulfilled his name, which, as we mentioned above, was John Smith—not Achilles Maravain.
Yet she persisted in calling him Achilles Maravain. She declaimed; she cried out; she excited herself and all present—all to the effect that John Smith was Achilles Maravain. Everybody paid her the best of attention, although they couldn't believe her. Everybody regarded her with interest. She had a wild, pale, exotic-looking face, a figure it would be indelicate to remark upon, and legs that were crystallized ecstasy. They listened to her words; they gazed upon her.
George R. Hahn published only three known science fiction stories, appearing once in the 1930s, once in the 1940s, and once in the 1950s. “Gangway for Homer,” published in 1947, is the middle entry in that small body of work and presents a striking premise: an ordinary man who suddenly becomes untouchable by any weapon and begins reshaping society according to his own grand design.
Though Hahn’s published output was brief, this story delivers a vivid piece of speculative fiction built around a single dangerous idea—what happens when one man gains the power to ignore every law, government, and army on Earth.
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