A Pail of Air

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The short story A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber, which appeared on the radio show X Minus One in March 1956, is narrated by a boy living on Earth after it has been torn from the Sun's gravity and captured by a passing "dark star".

The story is notable as an early depiction of an interstellar planet, though Earth was described as having been captured by the dark star rather than ejected into interstellar space.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The loss of solar heating has caused the gases of Earth's atmosphere to freeze out into thick layers of "snow". The boy's father, a scientist, had worked with a group of other scientists to construct a large shelter but the earthquakes accompanying the disaster had destroyed it and killed the rest. He resorted to constructing a smaller makeshift shelter called the "Nest" for his family, where they maintain a breathable atmosphere inside by retrieving pails of frozen oxygen to thaw over a fire. They have survived in this way for a number of years. At the end of the story they are contacted by rescuers from a large group of survivors at Los Alamos, where they were using nuclear power to provide heat and had begun using rockets to go out in search of other survivors (radio being ineffective at long range without an ionosphere). They reveal that other groups of humans had survived at Argonne, Brookhaven, Harwell and Tanna Tuva, and that plans were being made to establish uranium mining colonies at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.