Bryce Walton 25 min read

Dangling five thousand feet up with security men closing in from both ends, Charles Marquis tries to let go and fall to his death, and finds a paralysis beam has frozen his own hands against him.

Bryce Walton's 1953 story is a taut, bleak post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Gripping, grim golden-age SF. Read it for a tense story of a rebel against a controlling future state, denied even the escape of death, in a dark, driving golden-age piece about defiance, control, and what victory can mean under tyranny.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas