Robert Emmett McDowell 1 hr 54 min read

'Quiet!' Jon Saxon breathes, sweeping the girl into a shadowed doorway as danger prickles over his skin, the seventh-level thoroughfare of post-atom Earth's capital lies utterly deserted.

Robert Emmett McDowell's 1948 story is a rousing first-contact and military-SF space opera. Vivid, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful pulp adventure in a gleaming future Earth, where a hunted man and woman are drawn into intrigue and danger among the outcasts of Solar III.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 54 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams