Stephen Tall 21 min read

How warm should a handshake be? The answer may matter more than you'd guess. Three young men watch a faint red glow move along the lip of a distant glacier, then vanish, spooks, one jokes.

Stephen Tall's 1955 story is a thoughtful first-contact and hard-SF tale of a strange mountain encounter. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly building story where an eerie light on a high peak leads to a meeting between humans and visitors, and the warmth of a handshake proves genuinely vital.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Newman