Hayden Howard 36 min read

The monotonous cry of the kri-kri hushes with a clap of silence that snaps the young doctor upright in bed, five light-years from Earth, his wife asleep beside him, something wrong in the night.

Hayden Howard's 1953 story is a tense social-SF space opera of a colony in peril. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a settler's peaceful frontier night on a far world shatters into violence, and an alien code of killing forces a terrible reckoning.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas