In a shattered galaxy where war has left the male population crippled, the surviving societies cling to a fragile hope. Susan Wildress, a teenage girl in a sprawling ration hall, knows that defying the Center's strict rules could cost her life, yet she is driven by a memory that refuses to fade. She sneaks away with a locket around her neck, slipping into a ground‑car and heading toward the forbidden woods, where whispers of the mysterious Zeehites haunt every step.
The towering purple‑uniformed men of the Center appear suddenly, surrounding her with silent, coordinated precision. Their cold commands reveal a hidden program to extract girls from the factories, but the price of disobedience looms large, and Susan must decide whether to trust these strangers or risk execution for a single transgression. As tension builds, the story immerses listeners in a stark world of scarcity, secret societies, and the desperate yearning for a future beyond the endless war.
Language
en
Duration
~1 hours (66K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2021-08-27
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
A pulp-era science fiction writer whose stories mixed brisk adventure with offbeat speculative ideas, he appeared in genre magazines during the early 1950s and is still read today through public-domain and audio editions.
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