Peter Baily 12 min read

On a dead, frozen, wind-scoured world, a broken machine in a hollow stirs and begins, impossibly, to speak.

Peter Baily's 1961 story opens with gorgeous, desolate description of an ice precipice and the shattered artifact lying at the end of a plowed furrow of snow, as something mechanical fights to make itself heard in a lifeless wilderness. Atmospheric, precisely written SF that builds mystery from stillness. Read it for beautifully crafted magazine SF that turns a bleak alien landscape into a quiet, gripping puzzle.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

12 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr