Between the Dark and the Daylight

By Algis Budrys

Trapped in a protective underground world made of reinforced concrete they can here their enemies chipping away at their walls day after day, year after year, eventually they will get through, then what happens? Algis Budrys was the Hugo and Nebula award nominated author of Rogue Moon and Michaelmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781515445784

Algis Budrys

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, where his father served in the Lithuanian diplomatic corps. The family came to the United States when Budrys was five years old. A Renaissance man, he wrote stories and novels, and was an editor, critic, and reviewer, a teacher of aspiring writers, and a publisher. In the 1960s Budrys worked in public relations, advertising products such as pickles, tuna fish, and four-wheel-drive vehicles. His science fiction novels include Rogue Moon, Hard Landing, Falling Torch, and many others. His Cold War science fiction thriller Who? was adapted for the screen, and he received many award nominations for his work. Budrys was married to his wife, Edna, for almost fifty-four years.  

Book preview

Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Algis Budrys

©2020 Positronic Publishing

Between the Dark and the Daylight is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4578-4

Table of Contents

Between the Dark and the Daylight

Between the Dark and the Daylight

A curved section of the dome, twenty feet thick with the stubs of reinforcing rod rusty and protruding through the dampmarked concrete, formed the ceiling and back wall of Brendan’s office. There was a constant drip of seepage and condensation. Near the mildew-spotted floor, a thin white mist drifted in torn swirls while the heating coils buried in the concrete fought back against the cold. There was one lamp in the windowless dark, a glowing red coil on Brendan’s desk, well below the eye level of the half-dozen men in the room. The heavy office door was swung shut, the locking bars pushed home. If it had not been, there would have been some additional light from the coils in the corridor ceiling, outside the office. Brendan would have had to face into it, and the men in the front of him would have been looming shadows to him.

But the door was shut, as Brendan insisted it must be, as all doors to