H. Beam Piper 18 min read

'Are you there, Lee?' the Russian's voice comes through the dark, and Lee wakes from a precious dream of a woman with graying blonde hair, one of the few glimpses he's had in fifteen years.

H. Beam Piper's 1959 story is a somber, moving post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Thoughtful, haunting golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly powerful story where an American and a Russian scientist, working together after catastrophe, confront a discovery that answers a question humanity was never meant to ask.

In its time

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

Reading it

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