Jack Sharkey 16 min read

Lieutenant Lloyd spots the first alien in the red Martian ruins and creeps forward, pistol drawn, until loose gravel betrays him, and the creature spins about, a slim crystal tube in one appendage.

Jack Sharkey's 1961 story is a tense first-contact tale of a fraught meeting in Martian ruins. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a taut story where an explorer and an alien confront each other in a dead city, and the delicate, dangerous moment of first contact hinges on a single misstep.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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