James McKimmey 15 min read

Behind a screen of cigar smoke, Joseph Heidel studies the five top officials at his dinner table, the nucleus of human rule on occupied Mars, and one of them not what he seems.

James McKimmey's 1953 story is a tense first-contact and horror tale of hidden infiltration. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a taut story where the ruler of a Martian colony hunts a shape-hidden alien among his own trusted officials, and paranoia tightens toward a deadly reckoning.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban