Jack Sharkey 16 min read

A forty-second news bulletin, Russia's flat or-else, America's steely just-try-it, then routine programming resumes, and Pete Crolin turns to his wife: what do you think?

Jack Sharkey's 1963 story is a sharp post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Pointed, chilling golden-age SF. Read it for a tense Cold War story that opens on the ordinary and slides toward the unthinkable, following those clever enough to read the signs, in a mordant golden-age piece about nuclear brinkmanship and who the smart ones really are.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

George Schelling