Helen Huber 15 min read

It was not a sinister silence, no silence is, until it gains a background of menace. But something is wrong with the quiet of the hospital's basket room, among the rows of newborns.

Helen Huber's 1953 story builds creeping first-contact horror from a maternity ward's uncanny stillness. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a chilling tale where a nurse's instinct that something is deeply wrong among the sleeping infants proves all too right.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas