Daniel R. Gilgannon 54 min read

Every UN member gets the note: 'Give us peace within a month or I shall destroy the earth.' Only two men believe the physicist Chetzisky can do it, and race the red tape to find him in time.

Daniel R. Gilgannon's 1951 story is a tense hard-SF and post-apocalyptic thriller of nuclear blackmail. Sharp, driven golden-age SF. Read it for a race-against-the-clock tale where a terribly sincere scientist holds the world hostage, and two men must reach him before his deadline runs out.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Peter Poulton