Robert Wilson 57 min read

Deep beneath the Kansas prairie, a burrowing machine brings up a weird organism, the first of an invasion, and lays it before the demoralized scientists of a failing research institute.

Robert Wilson's 1945 story is a rousing first-contact and post-apocalyptic tale. Vivid, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful yarn where a strange life-form from below the earth heralds a menace to humanity, and a struggling institute of scientists must rise to meet it, in the wonder-and-peril style of the classic pulp-adventure magazines.

In its time

Published in 1945, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Joseph Doolin