Day of Reckoning

Day Of Reckoning by Morton Klass opens on the moment Earth has waited almost half a century to see: the alien Roggs defeated, their former slaves now the masters of their own world. An aging resistance leader sits across from Guja Hi, the Rogg administrator who once ordered his whipping, and calmly lays out the terms-every alien must leave Earth with nothing but the cloak on their back. As the negotiations unfold, Klass reveals the hidden history of how scattered slaves became a united species, forging a new language, a binding Oath, and a sense of brotherhood stronger than any planetary border.

But victory comes with a price. The old man remembers not only the agony of the mines and the cities burned to ash, but also how the Rogg conquest forced humanity to outgrow its own divisions. With the aliens facing exile and probable death on their homeworld, he must decide whether this new, unified humanity will cling to revenge or dare to be something better than its former masters. "Day Of Reckoning" is a powerful, thoughtful story about occupation, resistance, and the difficult grace of mercy at the end of a long war.

Morton Klass (1927-2001) was an American anthropologist and writer whose brief but memorable run in mid-century science fiction included stories like "The Altruist," "The Idealists," "In the Beginning," and "Day Of Reckoning," which appeared in the June 1957 issue of Fantastic Universe. Trained at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, Klass would go on to become a respected scholar of caste, religion, and cultural change, with influential studies of communities in India and the Indo-Caribbean.