Noel M. Loomis 25 min read

Mark Renner scrambles up an iron grating and drops among the dusty counters of a long-abandoned jewelry shop, hiding from the slow, slapping footsteps of the man Conley, in a world twenty years dead.

Noel M. Loomis's 1952 story is a tense first-contact and post-apocalyptic tale. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping story of a hunted man in a ruined future city, where survival is a grim game and wealth is meaningless, building through pursuit and dread toward revelation, in a well-turned golden-age piece with a sardonic bite beneath its title.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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