Bryce Walton 25 min read

First one up the tallest summit in the Solar System was a rotten egg, a very rotten egg. Bruce, reading smuggled Byron aboard ship, reluctantly rises to let the others in.

Bryce Walton's 1952 story is an atmospheric, haunting colonization and first-contact tale. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the conquest of a titanic alien mountain becomes something stranger than a climb, and the highest mountain of the title guards a secret about life and death itself.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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