Fox B. Holden 22 min read

'Let them in, sergeant,' says the exhausted World Space Force chief, as though ordering the most humiliating surrender in history, because that is exactly what it is.

Fox B. Holden's 1953 story opens on the bleak eve of defeat, launching a military first-contact tale of Earth's back-to-the-wall stand. Tense, dramatic golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping story of a beaten humanity that, even in surrender, refuses to ask for quarter.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry