Ben Bova 29 min read

Two men wintering at the South Pole pick up a signal, and must decide what to transmit back across the void.

Ben Bova's 1962 story draws on the astronomer-author's real expertise, sealing its narrator and Rizzo in a tiny polar dome amid fifty-below cold and shrieking wind as a momentous question of contact arrives. Grip­ping, emotionally resonant hard SF from a future master of the field. Read it for scientifically grounded first-contact SF that lingers long after the last page.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

29 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

George Schelling