Bryce Walton 9 min read

Jon races down the corridor to fling himself before the Old Man's gypsum chair, breathless and savagely eager: 'I seen 'em! I seen 'em!' The Mechs, and the Mechs may have seen him too.

Bryce Walton's 1948 story unfolds a stark post-apocalyptic and AI tale of humans hiding underground from the machines that inherited the surface. Atmospheric, tense golden-age SF. Read it for a story of the last people in their warrens, and the mechanical inheritors of a ruined world above.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams