Murray Leinster 27 min read

Tork, a simple cave-man who knows nothing but filling his belly, cannot dream that a mysterious 'star box' and the strange urge gripping his people are part of an alien experiment.

Murray Leinster's 1949 story is a thoughtful first-contact and colonization tale. Sharp, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive story of Antarean visitors meddling with the dawn of humanity, and the primitive man caught in their experiment, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the hidden alien hand that may have shaped our rise.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Lawrence Sterne Stevens