Murray Leinster 38 min read

In a Cold War world forever teetering on atomic war, the Western Alliance backs down again, but the discovery of a dead alien race may hold the key to Earth's very salvation.

Murray Leinster's 1963 story is a thoughtful first-contact and post-apocalyptic tale. Sharp, timely golden-age SF. Read it for a tense story where the wreckage of aliens who destroyed themselves in nuclear war offers a lesson, and a hope, to a divided Earth on the same brink, in a well-turned golden-age piece about survival and self-destruction.

In its time

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

Reading it

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