Earth after an atomic war is a dying world: overcrowded, starving, and run by big companies for their own benefit.
Released from prison, a former rocket pilot named John Delmar comes home to find his wife dead and nothing left worth staying for.Then a big man with a stolen fortune offers him a way out-pilot a rocket built from junk, loaded with smuggled weapons, to the one place where mankind still has a future: Mars. The Martian colony has broken free of Earth, but it desperately needs weapons to survive attacks from lobants, mysterious black-armored Martian creatures.
Crash-landed and half-dead, Delmar sets out to learn where the lobants come from-and finds an answer older and colder than anyone imagined...
First published in 1953 as by Charles Grey. New introduction by Philip Harbottle.