Arnold Marmor 7 min read

'This man is a spy for Earth,' the telecaster drones, flashing Harry Horn's face, ten thousand credits, dead or alive. And Lynn Brickel frowns: Horn was one of their own top men.

Arnold Marmor's 1959 story is a fast military space opera of espionage and shifting loyalties. Sharp, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a tense tale of double agents and danger on Mars, where a security officer must work out who can be trusted before the net closes in.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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