Irving E. Cox 38 min read

The robot supply ship comes every Thursday at seven past noon, an unfortunate hour, for it catches almost all fourteen hundred of the Nevada station at lunch, and only four escape what follows.

Irving E. Cox's 1955 story is a tense colonization and first-contact tale with a sharp opening. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a routine supply delivery becomes catastrophe, and the handful of survivors of a secret station must reckon with what has come to Earth.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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